1Git 2.11 Release Notes 2====================== 3 4Updates since v2.10 5------------------- 6 7UI, Workflows & Features 8 9 * "git format-patch --cover-letter HEAD^" to format a single patch 10 with a separate cover letter now numbers the output as [PATCH 0/1] 11 and [PATCH 1/1] by default. 12 13 * An incoming "git push" that attempts to push too many bytes can now 14 be rejected by setting a new configuration variable at the receiving 15 end. 16 17 * "git nosuchcommand --help" said "No manual entry for gitnosuchcommand", 18 which was not intuitive, given that "git nosuchcommand" said "git: 19 'nosuchcommand' is not a git command". 20 21 * "git clone --resurse-submodules --reference $path $URL" is a way to 22 reduce network transfer cost by borrowing objects in an existing 23 $path repository when cloning the superproject from $URL; it 24 learned to also peek into $path for presense of corresponding 25 repositories of submodules and borrow objects from there when able. 26 27 * The "git diff --submodule={short,log}" mechanism has been enhanced 28 to allow "--submodule=diff" to show the patch between the submodule 29 commits bound to the superproject. 30 31 * Even though "git hash-objects", which is a tool to take an 32 on-filesystem data stream and put it into the Git object store, 33 allowed to perform the "outside-world-to-Git" conversions (e.g. 34 end-of-line conversions and application of the clean-filter), and 35 it had the feature on by default from very early days, its reverse 36 operation "git cat-file", which takes an object from the Git object 37 store and externalize for the consumption by the outside world, 38 lacked an equivalent mechanism to run the "Git-to-outside-world" 39 conversion. The command learned the "--filters" option to do so. 40 41 * Output from "git diff" can be made easier to read by selecting 42 which lines are common and which lines are added/deleted 43 intelligently when the lines before and after the changed section 44 are the same. A command line option is added to help with the 45 experiment to find a good heuristics. 46 47 * In some projects, it is common to use "[RFC PATCH]" as the subject 48 prefix for a patch meant for discussion rather than application. A 49 new option "--rfc" was a short-hand for "--subject-prefix=RFC PATCH" 50 to help the participants of such projects. 51 52 * "git add --chmod=+x <pathspec>" added recently only toggled the 53 executable bit for paths that are either new or modified. This has 54 been corrected to flip the executable bit for all paths that match 55 the given pathspec. 56 57 58Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc. 59 60 * The delta-base-cache mechanism has been a key to the performance in 61 a repository with a tightly packed packfile, but it did not scale 62 well even with a larger value of core.deltaBaseCacheLimit. 63 64 * Enhance "git status --porcelain" output by collecting more data on 65 the state of the index and the working tree files, which may 66 further be used to teach git-prompt (in contrib/) to make fewer 67 calls to git. 68 69 * Extract a small helper out of the function that reads the authors 70 script file "git am" internally uses. 71 (merge a77598e jc/am-read-author-file later to maint). 72 73 * Lifts calls to exit(2) and die() higher in the callchain in 74 sequencer.c files so that more helper functions in it can be used 75 by callers that want to handle error conditions themselves. 76 77 * "git am" has been taught to make an internal call to "git apply"'s 78 innards without spawning the latter as a separate process. 79 80 * The ref-store abstraction was introduced to the refs API so that we 81 can plug in different backends to store references. 82 83 * The "unsigned char sha1[20]" to "struct object_id" conversion 84 continues. Notable changes in this round includes that ce->sha1, 85 i.e. the object name recorded in the cache_entry, turns into an 86 object_id. 87 88 * JGit can show a fake ref "capabilities^{}" to "git fetch" when it 89 does not advertise any refs, but "git fetch" was not prepared to 90 see such an advertisement. When the other side disconnects without 91 giving any ref advertisement, we used to say "there may not be a 92 repository at that URL", but we may have seen other advertisement 93 like "shallow" and ".have" in which case we definitely know that a 94 repository is there. The code to detect this case has also been 95 updated. 96 97 * Some codepaths in "git pack-objects" were not ready to use an 98 existing pack bitmap; now they are and as the result they have 99 become faster. 100 101 102Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups. 103 104 105Fixes since v2.10 106----------------- 107 108Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.9 in the maintenance 109track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases' 110notes for details). 111 112 * Clarify various ways to specify the "revision ranges" in the 113 documentation. 114 115 * "diff-highlight" script (in contrib/) learned to work better with 116 "git log -p --graph" output. 117 118 * The test framework left the number of tests and success/failure 119 count in the t/test-results directory, keyed by the name of the 120 test script plus the process ID. The latter however turned out not 121 to serve any useful purpose. The process ID part of the filename 122 has been removed. 123 124 * Having a submodule whose ".git" repository is somehow corrupt 125 caused a few commands that recurse into submodules loop forever. 126 127 * "git symbolic-ref -d HEAD" happily removes the symbolic ref, but 128 the resulting repository becomes an invalid one. Teach the command 129 to forbid removal of HEAD. 130 131 * A test spawned a short-lived background process, which sometimes 132 prevented the test directory from getting removed at the end of the 133 script on some platforms. 134 135 * Update a few tests that used to use GIT_CURL_VERBOSE to use the 136 newer GIT_TRACE_CURL. 137 138 * "git pack-objects --include-tag" was taught that when we know that 139 we are sending an object C, we want a tag B that directly points at 140 C but also a tag A that points at the tag B. We used to miss the 141 intermediate tag B in some cases. 142 (merge b773dde jk/pack-tag-of-tag later to maint). 143 144 * Update Japanese translation for "git-gui". 145 (merge 02748bc sy/git-gui-i18n-ja later to maint). 146 147 * "git fetch http::/site/path" did not die correctly and segfaulted 148 instead. 149 (merge d63ed6e jk/fix-remote-curl-url-wo-proto later to maint). 150 151 * "git commit-tree" stopped reading commit.gpgsign configuration 152 variable that was meant for Porcelain "git commit" in Git 2.9; we 153 forgot to update "git gui" to look at the configuration to match 154 this change. 155 (merge f14a310 js/git-gui-commit-gpgsign later to maint). 156 157 * "git add --chmod=+x" added recently lacked documentation, which has 158 been corrected. 159 (merge 7ef7903 et/add-chmod-x later to maint). 160 161 * "git log --cherry-pick" used to include merge commits as candidates 162 to be matched up with other commits, resulting a lot of wasted time. 163 The patch-id generation logic has been updated to ignore merges to 164 avoid the wastage. 165 (merge 7c81040 jk/patch-ids-no-merges later to maint). 166 167 * The http transport (with curl-multi option, which is the default 168 these days) failed to remove curl-easy handle from a curlm session, 169 which led to unnecessary API failures. 170 (merge 2abc848 ew/http-do-not-forget-to-call-curl-multi-remove-handle later to maint). 171 172 * There were numerous corner cases in which the configuration files 173 are read and used or not read at all depending on the directory a 174 Git command was run, leading to inconsistent behaviour. The code 175 to set-up repository access at the beginning of a Git process has 176 been updated to fix them. 177 (merge 4d0efa1 jk/setup-sequence-update later to maint). 178 179 * "git diff -W" output needs to extend the context backward to 180 include the header line of the current function and also forward to 181 include the body of the entire current function up to the header 182 line of the next one. This process may have to merge to adjacent 183 hunks, but the code forgot to do so in some cases. 184 (merge 45d2f75 rs/xdiff-merge-overlapping-hunks-for-W-context later to maint). 185 186 * Performance tests done via "t/perf" did not use the same set of 187 build configuration if the user relied on autoconf generated 188 configuration. 189 (merge cd5c281 ks/perf-build-with-autoconf later to maint). 190 191 * "git format-patch --base=..." feature that was recently added 192 showed the base commit information after "-- " e-mail signature 193 line, which turned out to be inconvenient. The base information 194 has been moved above the signature line. 195 (merge 480871e jt/format-patch-base-info-above-sig later to maint). 196 197 * More i18n. 198 (merge 43073f8 va/i18n later to maint). 199 200 * Even when "git pull --rebase=preserve" (and the underlying "git 201 rebase --preserve") can complete without creating any new commit 202 (i.e. fast-forwards), it still insisted on having a usable ident 203 information (read: user.email is set correctly), which was less 204 than nice. As the underlying commands used inside "git rebase" 205 would fail with a more meaningful error message and advice text 206 when the bogus ident matters, this extra check was removed. 207 (merge 1e461c4 jk/rebase-i-drop-ident-check later to maint). 208 209 * "git gc --aggressive" used to limit the delta-chain length to 250, 210 which is way too deep for gaining additional space savings and is 211 detrimental for runtime performance. The limit has been reduced to 212 50. 213 (merge 07e7dbf jk/reduce-gc-aggressive-depth later to maint). 214 215 * Documentation for individual configuration variables to control use 216 of color (like `color.grep`) said that their default value is 217 'false', instead of saying their default is taken from `color.ui`. 218 When we updated the default value for color.ui from 'false' to 219 'auto' quite a while ago, all of them broke. This has been 220 corrected. 221 (merge 14d16e2 mm/config-color-ui-default-to-auto later to maint). 222 223 * The pretty-format specifier "%C(auto)" used by the "log" family of 224 commands to enable coloring of the output is taught to also issue a 225 color-reset sequence to the output. 226 (merge c99ad27 rs/c-auto-resets-attributes later to maint). 227 228 * A shell script example in check-ref-format documentation has been 229 fixed. 230 (merge 92dece7 ep/doc-check-ref-format-example later to maint). 231 232 * "git checkout <word>" does not follow the usual disambiguation 233 rules when the <word> can be both a rev and a path, to allow 234 checking out a branch 'foo' in a project that happens to have a 235 file 'foo' in the working tree without having to disambiguate. 236 This was poorly documented and the check was incorrect when the 237 command was run from a subdirectory. 238 (merge b829b94 nd/checkout-disambiguation later to maint). 239 240 * Some codepaths in "git diff" used regexec(3) on a buffer that was 241 mmap(2)ed, which may not have a terminating NUL, leading to a read 242 beyond the end of the mapped region. This was fixed by introducing 243 a regexec_buf() helper that takes a <ptr,len> pair with REG_STARTEND 244 extension. 245 (merge b7d36ff js/regexec-buf later to maint). 246 247 * The procedure to build Git on Mac OS X for Travis CI hardcoded the 248 internal directory structure we assumed HomeBrew uses, which was a 249 no-no. The procedure has been updated to ask HomeBrew things we 250 need to know to fix this. 251 (merge f86f49b ls/travis-homebrew-path-fix later to maint). 252 253 * When "git rebase -i" is given a broken instruction, it told the 254 user to fix it with "--edit-todo", but didn't say what the step 255 after that was (i.e. "--continue"). 256 (merge 37875b4 rt/rebase-i-broken-insn-advise later to maint). 257 258 * Documentation around tools to import from CVS was fairly outdated. 259 (merge 106b672 jk/doc-cvs-update later to maint). 260 261 * "git clone --recurse-submodules" lost the progress eye-candy in 262 recent update, which has been corrected. 263 264 * Other minor doc, test and build updates and code cleanups. 265 (merge e78d57e bw/pathspec-remove-unused-extern-decl later to maint). 266 (merge ce25e4c rs/checkout-some-states-are-const later to maint). 267 (merge a8342a4 rs/strbuf-remove-fix later to maint). 268 (merge b56aa5b rs/unpack-trees-reduce-file-scope-global later to maint). 269 (merge 5efc60c mr/vcs-svn-printf-ulong later to maint). 270 (merge a22ae75 rs/cocci later to maint).