1Git 2.14 Release Notes 2====================== 3 4Backward compatibility notes and other notable changes. 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 * Git now avoids blindly falling back to ".git" when the setup 15 sequence said we are _not_ in Git repository. A corner case that 16 happens to work right now may be broken by a call to die("BUG"). 17 We've tried hard to locate such cases and fixed them, but there 18 might still be cases that need to be addressed--bug reports are 19 greatly appreciated. 20 21 * The experiment to improve the hunk-boundary selection of textual 22 diff output has finished, and the "indent heuristics" has now 23 become the default. 24 25 * Git can now be built with PCRE v2 instead of v1 of the PCRE 26 library. Replace USE_LIBPCRE=YesPlease with USE_LIBPCRE2=YesPlease 27 in existing build scripts to build against the new version. As the 28 upstream PCRE maintainer has abandoned v1 maintenance for all but 29 the most critical bug fixes, use of v2 is recommended. 30 31 32Updates since v2.13 33------------------- 34 35UI, Workflows & Features 36 37 * The colors in which "git status --short --branch" showed the names 38 of the current branch and its remote-tracking branch are now 39 configurable. 40 41 * "git clone" learned the "--no-tags" option not to fetch all tags 42 initially, and also set up the tagopt not to follow any tags in 43 subsequent fetches. 44 45 * "git archive --format=zip" learned to use zip64 extension when 46 necessary to go beyond the 4GB limit. 47 48 * "git reset" learned "--recurse-submodules" option. 49 50 * "git diff --submodule=diff" now recurses into nested submodules. 51 52 * "git repack" learned to accept the --threads=<n> option and pass it 53 to pack-objects. 54 55 * "git send-email" learned to run sendemail-validate hook to inspect 56 and reject a message before sending it out. 57 58 * There is no good reason why "git fetch $there $sha1" should fail 59 when the $sha1 names an object at the tip of an advertised ref, 60 even when the other side hasn't enabled allowTipSHA1InWant. 61 62 * The "[includeIf "gitdir:$dir"] path=..." mechanism introduced in 63 2.13.0 would canonicalize the path of the gitdir being matched, 64 and did not match e.g. "gitdir:~/work/*" against a repo in 65 "~/work/main" if "~/work" was a symlink to "/mnt/storage/work". 66 Now we match both the resolved canonical path and what "pwd" would 67 show. The include will happen if either one matches. 68 69 * The "indent" heuristics is now the default in "diff". The 70 diff.indentHeuristic configuration variable can be set to "false" 71 for those who do not want it. 72 73 * Many commands learned to pay attention to submodule.recurse 74 configuration. 75 76 * The convention for a command line is to follow "git cmdname 77 --options" with revisions followed by an optional "--" 78 disambiguator and then finally pathspecs. When "--" is not there, 79 we make sure early ones are all interpretable as revs (and do not 80 look like paths) and later ones are the other way around. A 81 pathspec with "magic" (e.g. ":/p/a/t/h" that matches p/a/t/h from 82 the top-level of the working tree, no matter what subdirectory you 83 are working from) are conservatively judged as "not a path", which 84 required disambiguation more often. The command line parser 85 learned to say "it's a pathspec" a bit more often when the syntax 86 looks like so. 87 88 * Update "perl-compatible regular expression" support to enable JIT 89 and also allow linking with the newer PCRE v2 library. 90 91 * "filter-branch" learned a pseudo filter "--setup" that can be used 92 to define common functions/variables that can be used by other 93 filters. 94 95 * Using "git add d/i/r" when d/i/r is the top of the working tree of 96 a separate repository would create a gitlink in the index, which 97 would appear as a not-quite-initialized submodule to others. We 98 learned to give warnings when this happens. 99 100 * "git status" learned to optionally give how many stash entries there 101 are in its output. 102 103 * "git status" has long shown essentially the same message as "git 104 commit"; the message it gives while preparing for the root commit, 105 i.e. "Initial commit", was hard to understand for some new users. 106 Now it says "No commits yet" to stress more on the current status 107 (rather than the commit the user is preparing for, which is more in 108 line with the focus of "git commit"). 109 110 * "git send-email" now has --batch-size and --relogin-delay options 111 which can be used to overcome limitations on SMTP servers that 112 restrict on how many of e-mails can be sent in a single session. 113 114 * An old message shown in the commit log template was removed, as it 115 has outlived its usefulness. 116 117 * "git pull --rebase --recurse-submodules" learns to rebase the 118 branch in the submodules to an updated base. 119 120 * "git log" learned -P as a synonym for --perl-regexp, "git grep" 121 already had such a synonym. 122 123 * "git log" didn't understand --regexp-ignore-case when combined with 124 --perl-regexp. This has been fixed. 125 126Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc. 127 128 * The default packed-git limit value has been raised on larger 129 platforms to save "git fetch" from a (recoverable) failure while 130 "gc" is running in parallel. 131 132 * Code to update the cache-tree has been tightened so that we won't 133 accidentally write out any 0{40} entry in the tree object. 134 135 * Attempt to allow us notice "fishy" situation where we fail to 136 remove the temporary directory used during the test. 137 138 * Travis CI gained a task to format the documentation with both 139 AsciiDoc and AsciiDoctor. 140 141 * Some platforms have ulong that is smaller than time_t, and our 142 historical use of ulong for timestamp would mean they cannot 143 represent some timestamp that the platform allows. Invent a 144 separate and dedicated timestamp_t (so that we can distingiuish 145 timestamps and a vanilla ulongs, which along is already a good 146 move), and then declare uintmax_t is the type to be used as the 147 timestamp_t. 148 149 * We can trigger Windows auto-build tester (credits: Dscho & 150 Microsoft) from our existing Travis CI tester now. 151 152 * Conversion from uchar[20] to struct object_id continues. 153 154 * Simplify parse_pathspec() codepath and stop it from looking at the 155 default in-core index. 156 157 * Add perf-test for wildmatch. 158 159 * Code from "conversion using external process" codepath has been 160 extracted to a separate sub-process.[ch] module. 161 162 * When "git checkout", "git merge", etc. manipulates the in-core 163 index, various pieces of information in the index extensions are 164 discarded from the original state, as it is usually not the case 165 that they are kept up-to-date and in-sync with the operation on the 166 main index. The untracked cache extension is copied across these 167 operations now, which would speed up "git status" (as long as the 168 cache is properly invalidated). 169 170 * The internal implementation of "git grep" has seen some clean-up. 171 172 * Update the C style recommendation for notes for translators, as 173 recent versions of gettext tools can work with our style of 174 multi-line comments. 175 176 * The implementation of "ref" API around the "packed refs" have been 177 cleaned up, in preparation for further changes. 178 179 * The internal logic used in "git blame" has been libified to make it 180 easier to use by cgit. 181 182 * Our code often opens a path to an optional file, to work on its 183 contents when we can successfully open it. We can ignore a failure 184 to open if such an optional file does not exist, but we do want to 185 report a failure in opening for other reasons (e.g. we got an I/O 186 error, or the file is there, but we lack the permission to open). 187 188 The exact errors we need to ignore are ENOENT (obviously) and 189 ENOTDIR (less obvious). Instead of repeating comparison of errno 190 with these two constants, introduce a helper function to do so. 191 192 * We often try to open a file for reading whose existence is 193 optional, and silently ignore errors from open/fopen; report such 194 errors if they are not due to missing files. 195 196 * When an existing repository is used for t/perf testing, we first 197 create bit-for-bit copy of it, which may grab a transient state of 198 the repository and freeze it into the repository used for testing, 199 which then may cause Git operations to fail. Single out "the index 200 being locked" case and forcibly drop the lock from the copy. 201 202 * Three instances of the same helper function have been consolidated 203 to one. 204 205 * "fast-import" uses a default pack chain depth that is consistent 206 with other parts of the system. 207 208 * A new test to show the interaction between the pattern [^a-z] 209 (which matches '/') and a slash in a path has been added. The 210 pattern should not match the slash with "pathmatch", but should 211 with "wildmatch". 212 213 * The 'diff-highlight' program (in contrib/) has been restructured 214 for easier reuse by an external project 'diff-so-fancy'. 215 216 * A common pattern to free a piece of memory and assign NULL to the 217 pointer that used to point at it has been replaced with a new 218 FREE_AND_NULL() macro. 219 220 * Traditionally, the default die() routine had a code to prevent it 221 from getting called multiple times, which interacted badly when a 222 threaded program used it (one downside is that the real error may 223 be hidden and instead the only error message given to the user may 224 end up being "die recursion detected", which is not very useful). 225 226 * Introduce a "repository" object to eventually make it easier to 227 work in multiple repositories (the primary focus is to work with 228 the superproject and its submodules) in a single process. 229 230 * Optimize "what are the object names already taken in an alternate 231 object database?" query that is used to derive the length of prefix 232 an object name is uniquely abbreviated to. 233 234 * The hashmap API has been updated so that data to customize the 235 behaviour of the comparison function can be specified at the time a 236 hashmap is initialized. 237 238 * The "collision detecting" SHA-1 implementation shipped with 2.13 is 239 now integrated into git.git as a submodule (the first submodule to 240 ship with git.git). Clone git.git with --recurse-submodules to get 241 it. For now a non-submodule copy of the same code is also shipped 242 as part of the tree. 243 244Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups. 245 246 247Fixes since v2.13 248----------------- 249 250Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.13 in the maintenance 251track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases' 252notes for details). 253 254 * "git gc" did not interact well with "git worktree"-managed 255 per-worktree refs. 256 257 * "git cherry-pick" and other uses of the sequencer machinery 258 mishandled a trailer block whose last line is an incomplete line. 259 This has been fixed so that an additional sign-off etc. are added 260 after completing the existing incomplete line. 261 262 * The codepath in "git am" that is used when running "git rebase" 263 leaked memory held for the log message of the commits being rebased. 264 265 * "git clone --config var=val" is a way to populate the 266 per-repository configuration file of the new repository, but it did 267 not work well when val is an empty string. This has been fixed. 268 269 * Setting "log.decorate=false" in the configuration file did not take 270 effect in v2.13, which has been corrected. 271 272 * A few codepaths in "checkout" and "am" working on an unborn branch 273 tried to access an uninitialized piece of memory. 274 275 * The Web interface to gmane news archive is long gone, even though 276 the articles are still accessible via NTTP. Replace the links with 277 ones to public-inbox.org. Because their message identification is 278 based on the actual message-id, it is likely that it will be easier 279 to migrate away from it if/when necessary. 280 281 * The receive-pack program now makes sure that the push certificate 282 records the same set of push options used for pushing. 283 284 * Tests have been updated to pass under GETTEXT_POISON (a mechanism 285 to ensure that output strings that should not be translated are 286 not translated by mistake), and TravisCI is told to run them. 287 288 * "git checkout --recurse-submodules" did not quite work with a 289 submodule that itself has submodules. 290 291 * "pack-objects" can stream a slice of an existing packfile out when 292 the pack bitmap can tell that the reachable objects are all needed 293 in the output, without inspecting individual objects. This 294 strategy however would not work well when "--local" and other 295 options are in use, and need to be disabled. 296 297 * Fix memory leaks pointed out by Coverity (and people). 298 299 * "git read-tree -m" (no tree-ish) gave a nonsense suggestion "use 300 --empty if you want to clear the index". With "-m", such a request 301 will still fail anyway, as you'd need to name at least one tree-ish 302 to be merged. 303 304 * Make sure our tests would pass when the sources are checked out 305 with "platform native" line ending convention by default on 306 Windows. Some "text" files out tests use and the test scripts 307 themselves that are meant to be run with /bin/sh, ought to be 308 checked out with eol=LF even on Windows. 309 310 * Introduce the BUG() macro to improve die("BUG: ..."). 311 312 * Clarify documentation for include.path and includeIf.<condition>.path 313 configuration variables. 314 315 * Git sometimes gives an advice in a rhetorical question that does 316 not require an answer, which can confuse new users and non native 317 speakers. Attempt to rephrase them. 318 319 * A few http:// links that are redirected to https:// in the 320 documentation have been updated to https:// links. 321 322 * "git for-each-ref --format=..." with %(HEAD) in the format used to 323 resolve the HEAD symref as many times as it had processed refs, 324 which was wasteful, and "git branch" shared the same problem. 325 326 * Regression fix to topic recently merged to 'master'. 327 328 * The shell completion script (in contrib/) learned "git stash" has 329 a new "push" subcommand. 330 331 * "git interpret-trailers", when used as GIT_EDITOR for "git commit 332 -v", looked for and appended to a trailer block at the very end, 333 i.e. at the end of the "diff" output. The command has been 334 corrected to pay attention to the cut-mark line "commit -v" adds to 335 the buffer---the real trailer block should appear just before it. 336 337 * A test allowed both "git push" and "git receive-pack" on the other 338 end write their traces into the same file. This is OK on platforms 339 that allows atomically appending to a file opened with O_APPEND, 340 but on other platforms led to a mangled output, causing 341 intermittent test failures. This has been fixed by disabling 342 traces from "receive-pack" in the test. 343 344 * Tag objects, which are not reachable from any ref, that point at 345 missing objects were mishandled by "git gc" and friends (they 346 should silently be ignored instead) 347 348 * "git describe --contains" penalized light-weight tags so much that 349 they were almost never considered. Instead, give them about the 350 same chance to be considered as an annotated tag that is the same 351 age as the underlying commit would. 352 353 * The "run-command" API implementation has been made more robust 354 against dead-locking in a threaded environment. 355 356 * A recent update to t5545-push-options.sh started skipping all the 357 tests in the script when a web server testing is disabled or 358 unavailable, not just the ones that require a web server. Non HTTP 359 tests have been salvaged to always run in this script. 360 361 * "git send-email" now uses Net::SMTP::SSL, which is obsolete, only 362 when needed. Recent versions of Net::SMTP can do TLS natively. 363 364 * "foo\bar\baz" in "git fetch foo\bar\baz", even though there is no 365 slashes in it, cannot be a nickname for a remote on Windows, as 366 that is likely to be a pathname on a local filesystem. 367 368 * "git clean -d" used to clean directories that has ignored files, 369 even though the command should not lose ignored ones without "-x". 370 "git status --ignored" did not list ignored and untracked files 371 without "-uall". These have been corrected. 372 373 * The result from "git diff" that compares two blobs, e.g. "git diff 374 $commit1:$path $commit2:$path", used to be shown with the full 375 object name as given on the command line, but it is more natural to 376 use the $path in the output and use it to look up .gitattributes. 377 378 * The "collision detecting" SHA-1 implementation shipped with 2.13 379 was quite broken on some big-endian platforms and/or platforms that 380 do not like unaligned fetches. Update to the upstream code which 381 has already fixed these issues. 382 383 * "git am -h" triggered a BUG(). 384 385 * The interaction of "url.*.insteadOf" and custom URL scheme's 386 whitelisting is now documented better. 387 388 * The timestamp of the index file is now taken after the file is 389 closed, to help Windows, on which a stale timestamp is reported by 390 fstat() on a file that is opened for writing and data was written 391 but not yet closed. 392 393 * "git pull --rebase --autostash" didn't auto-stash when the local history 394 fast-forwards to the upstream. 395 396 * A flaky test has been corrected. 397 398 * "git $cmd -h" for builtin commands calls the implementation of the 399 command (i.e. cmd_$cmd() function) without doing any repository 400 set-up, and the commands that expect RUN_SETUP is done by the Git 401 potty needs to be prepared to show the help text without barfing. 402 (merge d691551192 jk/consistent-h later to maint). 403 404 * Help contributors that visit us at GitHub. 405 406 * "git stash push <pathspec>" did not work from a subdirectory at all. 407 Bugfix for a topic in v2.13 408 409 * As there is no portable way to pass timezone information to 410 strftime, some output format from "git log" and friends are 411 impossible to produce. Teach our own strbuf_addftime to replace %z 412 and %Z with caller-supplied values to help working around this. 413 (merge 6eced3ec5e rs/strbuf-addftime-zZ later to maint). 414 415 * "git mergetool" learned to work around a wrapper MacOS X adds 416 around underlying meld. 417 418 * An example in documentation that does not work in multi worktree 419 configuration has been corrected. 420 421 * The pretty-format specifiers like '%h', '%t', etc. had an 422 optimization that no longer works correctly. In preparation/hope 423 of getting it correctly implemented, first discard the optimization 424 that is broken. 425 426 * The code to pick up and execute command alias definition from the 427 configuration used to switch to the top of the working tree and 428 then come back when the expanded alias was executed, which was 429 unnecessarilyl complex. Attempt to simplify the logic by using the 430 early-config mechanism that does not chdir around. 431 432 * Fix configuration codepath to pay proper attention to commondir 433 that is used in multi-worktree situation, and isolate config API 434 into its own header file. 435 (merge dc8441fdb4 bw/config-h later to maint). 436 437 * "git add -p" were updated in 2.12 timeframe to cope with custom 438 core.commentchar but the implementation was buggy and a 439 metacharacter like $ and * did not work. 440 441 * A recent regression in "git rebase -i" has been fixed and tests 442 that would have caught it and others have been added. 443 444 * An unaligned 32-bit access in pack-bitmap code has been corrected. 445 446 * Tighten error checks for invalid "git apply" input. 447 448 * The split index code did not honor core.sharedRepository setting 449 correctly. 450 451 * The Makefile rule in contrib/subtree for building documentation 452 learned to honour USE_ASCIIDOCTOR just like the main documentation 453 set does. 454 455 * Code clean-up to fix possible buffer over-reading. 456 (merge 2d105451c0 rs/apply-avoid-over-reading later to maint). 457 458 * A few tests that tried to verify the contents of push certificates 459 did not use 'git rev-parse' to formulate the line to look for in 460 the certificate correctly. 461 462 * Update the character width tables. 463 (merge 7560aacd7c bb/unicode-10.0 later to maint). 464 465 * After "git branch --move" of the currently checked out branch, the 466 code to walk the reflog of HEAD via "log -g" and friends 467 incorrectly stopped at the reflog entry that records the renaming 468 of the branch. 469 470 * The rewrite of "git branch --list" using for-each-ref's internals 471 that happened in v2.13 regressed its handling of color.branch.local; 472 this has been fixed. 473 474 * The build procedure has been improved to allow building and testing 475 Git with address sanitizer more easily. 476 (merge 566cf0b3bd jk/build-with-asan later to maint). 477 478 * On Cygwin, similar to Windows, "git push //server/share/repository" 479 ought to mean a repository on a network share that can be accessed 480 locally, but this did not work correctly due to stripping the double 481 slashes at the beginning. 482 (merge 496f256989 tb/push-to-cygwin-unc-path later to maint). 483 484 * The progress meter did not give a useful output when we haven't had 485 0.5 seconds to measure the throughput during the interval. Instead 486 show the overall throughput rate at the end, which is a much more 487 useful number. 488 (merge 0fae1e072a rs/progress-overall-throughput-at-the-end later to maint). 489 490 * Code clean-up, that makes us in sync with Debian by one patch. 491 (merge 8db1ae5740 jn/hooks-pre-rebase-sample-fix later to maint). 492 493 * We run an early part of "git gc" that deals with refs before 494 daemonising (and not under lock) even when running a background 495 auto-gc, which caused multiple gc processes attempting to run the 496 early part at the same time. This is now prevented by running the 497 early part also under the GC lock. 498 (merge c45af94dbc jk/gc-pre-detach-under-hook later to maint). 499 500 * Other minor doc, test and build updates and code cleanups. 501 (merge 3f9c637ec7 pw/unquote-path-in-git-pm later to maint). 502 (merge 5053313562 rs/urlmatch-cleanup later to maint). 503 (merge 42c78a216e rs/use-div-round-up later to maint). 504 (merge 5e8d2729ae rs/wt-status-cleanup later to maint). 505 (merge 01826066b0 ks/fix-rebase-doc-picture later to maint).