Git 2.12 Release Notes ====================== Backward compatibility notes. * Use of an empty string that is used for 'everything matches' is still warned and Git asks users to use a more explicit '.' for that instead. The hope is that existing users will not mind this change, and eventually the warning can be turned into a hard error, upgrading the deprecation into removal of this (mis)feature. That is not scheduled to happen in the upcoming release (yet). * The historical argument order "git merge HEAD ..." has been deprecated for quite some time, and will be removed in the upcoming release. Updates since v2.11 ------------------- UI, Workflows & Features * Various updates to "git p4". * "git p4" didn't interact with the internal of .git directory correctly in the modern "git-worktree"-enabled world. * "git branch --list" and friends learned "--ignore-case" option to optionally sort branches and tags case insensitively. * In addition to %(subject), %(body), "log --pretty=format:..." learned a new placeholder %(trailers). * "git rebase" learned "--quit" option, which allows a user to remove the metadata left by an earlier "git rebase" that was manually aborted without using "git rebase --abort". * "git clone --reference $there --recurse-submodules $super" has been taught to guess repositories usable as references for submodules of $super that are embedded in $there while making a clone of the superproject borrow objects from $there; extend the mechanism to also allow submodules of these submodules to borrow repositories embedded in these clones of the submodules embedded in the clone of the superproject. * Porcelain scripts written in Perl are getting internationalized. * "git merge --continue" has been added as a synonym to "git commit" to conclude a merge that has stopped due to conflicts. * Finer-grained control of what protocols are allowed for transports during clone/fetch/push have been enabled via a new configuration mechanism. * "git shortlog" learned "--committer" option to group commits by committer, instead of author. * GitLFS integration with "git p4" has been updated. * The isatty() emulation for Windows has been updated to eradicate the previous hack that depended on internals of (older) MSVC runtime. * Some platforms no longer understand "latin-1" that is still seen in the wild in e-mail headers; replace them with "iso-8859-1" that is more widely known when conversion fails from/to it. (merge df3755888b jc/latin-1 later to maint). Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc. * Commands that operate on a log message and add lines to the trailer blocks, such as "format-patch -s", "cherry-pick (-x|-s)", and "commit -s", have been taught to use the logic of and share the code with "git interpret-trailer". * The default Travis-CI configuration specifies newer P4 and GitLFS. * The "fast hash" that had disastrous performance issues in some corner cases has been retired from the internal diff. * The character width table has been updated to match Unicode 9.0 * Update the procedure to generate "tags" for developer support. (merge 046e4c1c09 jk/make-tags-find-sources-tweak later to maint). * The codeflow of setting NOATIME and CLOEXEC on file descriptors Git opens has been simplified. (merge b4d065df03 jc/git-open-cloexec later to maint). * "git diff" and its family had two experimental heuristics to shift the contents of a hunk to make the patch easier to read. One of them turns out to be better than the other, so leave only the "--indent-heuristic" option and remove the other one. (merge 3cde4e02ee jc/retire-compaction-heuristics later to maint). * A new submodule helper "git submodule embedgitdirs" to make it easier to move embedded .git/ directory for submodules in a superproject to .git/modules/ (and point the latter with the former that is turned into a "gitdir:" file) has been added. Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups. Fixes since v2.10 ----------------- Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.9 in the maintenance track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases' notes for details). * We often decide if a session is interactive by checking if the standard I/O streams are connected to a TTY, but isatty() that comes with Windows incorrectly returned true if it is used on NUL (i.e. an equivalent to /dev/null). This has been fixed. * "git svn" did not work well with path components that are "0", and some configuration variable it uses were not documented. (merge ea9a93dcc2 ew/svn-fixes later to maint). * "git rev-parse --symbolic" failed with a more recent notation like "HEAD^-1" and "HEAD^!". * An empty directory in a working tree that can simply be nuked used to interfere while merging or cherry-picking a change to create a submodule directory there, which has been fixed.. * The code in "git push" to compute if any commit being pushed in the superproject binds a commit in a submodule that hasn't been pushed out was overly inefficient, making it unusable even for a small project that does not have any submodule but have a reasonable number of refs. * "git push --dry-run --recurse-submodule=on-demand" wasn't "--dry-run" in the submodules. * The output from "git worktree list" was made in readdir() order, and was unstable. * mergetool..trustExitCode configuration variable did not apply to built-in tools, but now it does. * "git p4" LFS support was broken when LFS stores an empty blob. * A corner case in merge-recursive regression that crept in during 2.10 development cycle has been fixed. * Transport with dumb http can be fooled into following foreign URLs that the end user does not intend to, especially with the server side redirects and http-alternates mechanism, which can lead to security issues. Tighten the redirection and make it more obvious to the end user when it happens. * Update the error messages from the dumb-http client when it fails to obtain loose objects; we used to give sensible error message only upon 404 but we now forbid unexpected redirects that needs to be reported with something sensible. * When diff.renames configuration is on (and with Git 2.9 and later, it is enabled by default, which made it worse), "git stash" misbehaved if a file is removed and another file with a very similar content is added. * "git diff --no-index" did not take "--no-abbrev" option. * "git difftool --dir-diff" had a minor regression when started from a subdirectory, which has been fixed. * "git commit --allow-empty --only" (no pathspec) with dirty index ought to be an acceptable way to create a new commit that does not change any paths, but it was forbidden, perhaps because nobody needed it so far. * Git 2.11 had a minor regression in "merge --ff-only" that competed with another process that simultanously attempted to update the index. We used to explain what went wrong with an error message, but the new code silently failed. The error message has been resurrected. * A pathname that begins with "//" or "\\" on Windows is special but path normalization logic was unaware of it. * "git pull --rebase", when there is no new commits on our side since we forked from the upstream, should be able to fast-forward without invoking "git rebase", but it didn't. * The way to specify hotkeys to "xxdiff" that is used by "git mergetool" has been modernized to match recent versions of xxdiff. * Unlike "git am --abort", "git cherry-pick --abort" moved HEAD back to where cherry-pick started while picking multiple changes, when the cherry-pick stopped to ask for help from the user, and the user did "git reset --hard" to a different commit in order to re-attempt the operation. * Code cleanup in shallow boundary computation. * A recent update to receive-pack to make it easier to drop garbage objects made it clear that GIT_ALTERNATE_OBJECT_DIRECTORIES cannot have a pathname with a colon in it (no surprise!), and this in turn made it impossible to push into a repository at such a path. This has been fixed by introducing a quoting mechanism used when appending such a path to the colon-separated list. * The function usage_msg_opt() has been updated to say "fatal:" before the custom message programs give, when they want to die with a message about wrong command line options followed by the standard usage string. * "git index-pack --stdin" needs an access to an existing repository, but "git index-pack file.pack" to generate an .idx file that corresponds to a packfile does not. * Fix for NDEBUG builds. * A lazy "git push" without refspec did not internally use a fully specified refspec to perform 'current', 'simple', or 'upstream' push, causing unnecessary "ambiguous ref" errors. * "git p4" misbehaved when swapping a directory and a symbolic link. * Even though an fix was attempted in Git 2.9.3 days, but running "git difftool --dir-diff" from a subdirectory never worked. This has been fixed. * "git p4" that tracks multile p4 paths imported a single changelist that touches files in these multiple paths as one commit, followed by many empty commits. This has been fixed. * A potential but unlikely buffer overflow in Windows port has been fixed. * When the http server gives an incomplete response to a smart-http rpc call, it could lead to client waiting for a full response that will never come. Teach the client side to notice this condition and abort the transfer. * Compression setting for producing packfiles were spread across three codepaths, one of which did not honor any configuration. Unify these so that all of them honor core.compression and pack.compression variables the same way. (merge 8de7eeb54b jc/compression-config later to maint). * "git fast-import" sometimes mishandled while rebalancing notes tree, which has been fixed. (merge 405d7f4af6 mh/fast-import-notes-fix-new later to maint). * Recent update to the default abbreviation length that auto-scales lacked documentation update, which has been corrected. (merge 48d5014dd4 jc/abbrev-autoscale-config later to maint). * Leakage of lockfiles in the config subsystem has been fixed. (merge c06fa62dfc nd/config-misc-fixes later to maint). * Other minor doc, test and build updates and code cleanups. (merge f2627d9b19 sb/submodule-config-cleanup later to maint).