Git 2.13 Release Notes ====================== Backward compatibility notes. * Use of an empty string as a pathspec element 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 a future release. Updates since v2.12 ------------------- UI, Workflows & Features * "git describe" and "git name-rev" have been taught to take more than one refname patterns to restrict the set of refs to base their naming output on, and also learned to take negative patterns to name refs not to be used for naming via their "--exclude" option. * Deletion of a branch "foo/bar" could remove .git/refs/heads/foo once there no longer is any other branch whose name begins with "foo/", but we didn't do so so far. Now we do. * When "git merge" detects a path that is renamed in one history while the other history deleted (or modified) it, it now reports both paths to help the user understand what is going on in the two histories being merged. * The part in "http.." configuration variable can now be spelled with '*' that serves as wildcard. E.g. "http.https://*.example.com.proxy" can be used to specify the proxy used for https://a.example.com, https://b.example.com, etc., i.e. any host in the example.com domain. * "git tag" did not leave useful message when adding a new entry to reflog; this was left unnoticed for a long time because refs/tags/* doesn't keep reflog by default. * The "negative" pathspec feature was somewhat more cumbersome to use than necessary in that its short-hand used "!" which needed to be escaped from shells, and it required "exclude from what?" specified. * The command line options for ssh invocation needs to be tweaked for some implementations of SSH (e.g. PuTTY plink wants "-P " while OpenSSH wants "-p " to specify port to connect to), and the variant was guessed when GIT_SSH environment variable is used to specify it. The logic to guess now applies to the command specified by the newer GIT_SSH_COMMAND and also core.sshcommand configuration variable, and comes with an escape hatch for users to deal with misdetected cases. * The "--git-path", "--git-common-dir", and "--shared-index-path" options of "git rev-parse" did not produce usable output. They are now updated to show the path to the correct file, relative to where the caller is. * "git diff -W" has been taught to handle the case where a new function is added at the end of the file better. * "git update-ref -d" and other operations to delete references did not leave any entry in HEAD's reflog when the reference being deleted was the current branch. This is not a problem in practice because you do not want to delete the branch you are currently on, but caused renaming of the current branch to something else not to be logged in a useful way. * "Cc:" on the trailer part does not have to conform to RFC strictly, unlike in the e-mail header. "git send-email" has been updated to ignore anything after '>' when picking addresses, to allow non-address cruft like " # stable 4.4" after the address. (merge 9d3343961b jh/send-email-one-cc later to maint). * When "git submodule init" decides that the submodule in the working tree is its upstream, it now gives a warning as it is not a very common setup. (merge d1b3b81aab sb/submodule-init-url-selection later to maint). * "git stash save" takes a pathspec so that the local changes can be stashed away only partially. (merge 9e140909f6 tg/stash-push later to maint). Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc. * The code to list branches in "git branch" has been consolidated with the more generic ref-filter API. * Resource usage while enumerating refs from alternate object store has been optimized to help receiving end of "push" that hosts a repository with many "forks". * The gitattributes machinery is being taught to work better in a multi-threaded environment. * "git rebase -i" starts using the recently updated "sequencer" code. * Code and design clean-up for the refs API. * The preload-index code has been taught not to bother with the index entries that are paths that are not checked out by "sparse checkout". * Some warning() messages from "git clean" were updated to show the errno from failed system calls. * The "parse_config_key()" API function has been cleaned up. (merge ad8c7cdadd jk/parse-config-key-cleanup later to maint). * A test that creates a confusing branch whose name is HEAD has been corrected not to do so. (merge f0252ca23c jk/t6300-cleanup later to maint). * The code that parses header fields in the commit object has been updated for (micro)performance and code hygiene. (merge b072504ce1 rs/commit-parsing-optim later to maint). * An helper function to make it easier to append the result from real_path() to a strbuf has been added. (merge 33ad9ddd0b rs/strbuf-add-real-path later to maint). * Reduce authentication round-trip over HTTP when the server supports just a single authentication method. This also improves the behaviour when Git is misconfigured to enable http.emptyAuth against a server that does not authenticate without a username (i.e. not using Kerberos etc., which makes http.emptyAuth pointless). (merge 40a18fc77c jk/http-auth later to maint). Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups. Fixes since v2.12 ----------------- 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). * "git repack --depth=" for a long time busted the specified depth when reusing delta from existing packs. This has been corrected. (merge 42b766d765 jk/delta-chain-limit later to maint). * The code to parse the command line "git grep ... [[--] ...]" has been cleaned up, and a handful of bugs have been fixed (e.g. we used to check "--" if it is a rev). (merge 131f3c96d2 jk/grep-no-index-fix later to maint). * "git ls-remote" and "git archive --remote" are designed to work without being in a directory under Git's control. However, recent updates revealed that we randomly look into a directory called .git/ without actually doing necessary set-up when working in a repository. Stop doing so. (merge 4b0c3c7735 jn/remote-helpers-with-git-dir later to maint). * "git show-branch" expected there were only very short branch names in the repository and used a fixed-length buffer to hold them without checking for overflow. (merge d3cc5f4c44 jk/show-branch-lift-name-len-limit later to maint). * A caller of tempfile API that uses stdio interface to write to files may ignore errors while writing, which is detected when tempfile is closed (with a call to ferror()). By that time, the original errno that may have told us what went wrong is likely to be long gone and was overwritten by an irrelevant value. close_tempfile() now resets errno to EIO to make errno at least predictable. (merge 7e8c9355b7 jk/tempfile-ferror-fclose-confusion later to maint). * "git remote rm X", when a branch has remote X configured as the value of its branch.*.remote, tried to remove branch.*.remote and branch.*.merge and failed if either is unset. (merge 20690b2139 rl/remote-allow-missing-branch-name-merge later to maint). * A "gc.log" file left by a backgrounded "gc --auto" disables further automatic gc; it has been taught to run at least once a day (by default) by ignoring a stale "gc.log" file that is too old. (merge a831c06a2b dt/gc-ignore-old-gc-logs later to maint). * The code to parse "git -c VAR=VAL cmd" and set configuration variable for the duration of cmd had two small bugs, which have been fixed. (merge 1274a155af jc/config-case-cmdline-take-2 later to maint). * user.email that consists of only cruft chars should consistently error out, but didn't. (merge 94425552f3 jk/ident-empty later to maint). * "git upload-pack", which is a counter-part of "git fetch", did not report a request for a ref that was not advertised as invalid. This is generally not a problem (because "git fetch" will stop before making such a request), but is the right thing to do. (merge bdb31eada7 jt/upload-pack-error-report later to maint). * A leak in a codepath to read from a packed object in (rare) cases has been plugged. (merge 886ddf4777 rs/sha1-file-plug-fallback-base-leak later to maint). * When a redirected http transport gets an error during the redirected request, we ignored the error we got from the server, and ended up giving a not-so-useful error message. (merge 8e27391a5f jt/http-base-url-update-upon-redirect later to maint). * Other minor doc, test and build updates and code cleanups. (merge 2cfa83574c mm/two-more-xstrfmt later to maint). (merge b803ae4427 ps/docs-diffcore later to maint). (merge bcd886d897 ew/markdown-url-in-readme later to maint). (merge b2d593a779 rj/remove-unused-mktemp later to maint).