Git 2.11 Release Notes
======================
+Backward compatibility notes.
+
+ * An empty string used as a pathspec element has always meant
+ 'everything matches', but it is too easy to write a script that
+ finds a path to remove in $path and run 'git rm "$paht"', which
+ ends up removing everything. This release starts warning about the
+ use of an empty string that is used for 'everything matches' and
+ 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.
+
+
+ * The historical argument order "git merge <msg> HEAD <commit>..."
+ has been deprecated for quite some time, and will be removed in the
+ next release (not this one).
+
+
Updates since v2.10
-------------------
UI, Workflows & Features
+ * Comes with new version of git-gui, now at its 0.21.0 tag.
+
* "git format-patch --cover-letter HEAD^" to format a single patch
with a separate cover letter now numbers the output as [PATCH 0/1]
and [PATCH 1/1] by default.
to allow "--submodule=diff" to show the patch between the submodule
commits bound to the superproject.
+ * Even though "git hash-objects", which is a tool to take an
+ on-filesystem data stream and put it into the Git object store,
+ allowed to perform the "outside-world-to-Git" conversions (e.g.
+ end-of-line conversions and application of the clean-filter), and
+ it had the feature on by default from very early days, its reverse
+ operation "git cat-file", which takes an object from the Git object
+ store and externalize for the consumption by the outside world,
+ lacked an equivalent mechanism to run the "Git-to-outside-world"
+ conversion. The command learned the "--filters" option to do so.
+
+ * Output from "git diff" can be made easier to read by selecting
+ which lines are common and which lines are added/deleted
+ intelligently when the lines before and after the changed section
+ are the same. A command line option is added to help with the
+ experiment to find a good heuristics.
+
+ * In some projects, it is common to use "[RFC PATCH]" as the subject
+ prefix for a patch meant for discussion rather than application. A
+ new option "--rfc" was a short-hand for "--subject-prefix=RFC PATCH"
+ to help the participants of such projects.
+
+ * "git add --chmod=+x <pathspec>" added recently only toggled the
+ executable bit for paths that are either new or modified. This has
+ been corrected to flip the executable bit for all paths that match
+ the given pathspec.
+
+ * When "git format-patch --stdout" output is placed as an in-body
+ header and it uses the RFC2822 header folding, "git am" failed to
+ put the header line back into a single logical line. The
+ underlying "git mailinfo" was taught to handle this properly.
+
+ * "gitweb" can spawn "highlight" to show blob contents with
+ (programming) language-specific syntax highlighting, but only
+ when the language is known. "highlight" can however be told
+ to make the guess itself by giving it "--force" option, which
+ has been enabled.
+
+ * "git gui" l10n to Portuguese.
+
+ * When given an abbreviated object name that is not (or more
+ realistically, "no longer") unique, we gave a fatal error
+ "ambiguous argument". This error is now accompanied by hints that
+ lists the objects that begins with the given prefix. During the
+ course of development of this new feature, numerous minor bugs were
+ uncovered and corrected, the most notable one of which is that we
+ gave "short SHA1 xxxx is ambiguous." twice without good reason.
+
+ * "git log rev^..rev" is an often-used revision range specification
+ to show what was done on a side branch merged at rev. This has
+ gained a short-hand "rev^-1". In general "rev^-$n" is the same as
+ "^rev^$n rev", i.e. what has happened on other branches while the
+ history leading to nth parent was looking the other way.
+
+ * In recent versions of cURL, GSSAPI credential delegation is
+ disabled by default due to CVE-2011-2192; introduce a configuration
+ to selectively allow enabling this.
+ (merge 26a7b23429 ps/http-gssapi-cred-delegation later to maint).
+
+ * "git mergetool" learned to honor "-O<orderfile>" to control the
+ order of paths to present to the end user.
+
+ * "git diff/log --ws-error-highlight=<kind>" lacked the corresponding
+ configuration variable to set it by default.
+
+ * "git ls-files" learned "--recurse-submodules" option that can be
+ used to get a listing of tracked files across submodules (i.e. this
+ only works with "--cached" option, not for listing untracked or
+ ignored files). This would be a useful tool to sit on the upstream
+ side of a pipe that is read with xargs to work on all working tree
+ files from the top-level superproject.
+
+ * A new credential helper that talks via "libsecret" with
+ implementations of XDG Secret Service API has been added to
+ contrib/credential/.
+
+ * The GPG verification status shown in "%G?" pretty format specifier
+ was not rich enough to differentiate a signature made by an expired
+ key, a signature made by a revoked key, etc. New output letters
+ have been assigned to express them.
+
+ * In addition to purely abbreviated commit object names, "gitweb"
+ learned to turn "git describe" output (e.g. v2.9.3-599-g2376d31787)
+ into clickable links in its output.
+
Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.
i.e. the object name recorded in the cache_entry, turns into an
object_id.
+ * JGit can show a fake ref "capabilities^{}" to "git fetch" when it
+ does not advertise any refs, but "git fetch" was not prepared to
+ see such an advertisement. When the other side disconnects without
+ giving any ref advertisement, we used to say "there may not be a
+ repository at that URL", but we may have seen other advertisement
+ like "shallow" and ".have" in which case we definitely know that a
+ repository is there. The code to detect this case has also been
+ updated.
+
+ * Some codepaths in "git pack-objects" were not ready to use an
+ existing pack bitmap; now they are and as the result they have
+ become faster.
+
+ * The codepath in "git fsck" to detect malformed tree objects has
+ been updated not to die but keep going after detecting them.
+
+ * We call "qsort(array, nelem, sizeof(array[0]), fn)", and most of
+ the time third parameter is redundant. A new QSORT() macro lets us
+ omit it.
+
+ * "git pack-objects" in a repository with many packfiles used to
+ spend a lot of time looking for/at objects in them; the accesses to
+ the packfiles are now optimized by checking the most-recently-used
+ packfile first.
+ (merge c9af708b1a jk/pack-objects-optim-mru later to maint).
+
+ * Codepaths involved in interacting alternate object store have
+ been cleaned up.
+
+ * In order for the receiving end of "git push" to inspect the
+ received history and decide to reject the push, the objects sent
+ from the sending end need to be made available to the hook and
+ the mechanism for the connectivity check, and this was done
+ traditionally by storing the objects in the receiving repository
+ and letting "git gc" to expire it. Instead, store the newly
+ received objects in a temporary area, and make them available by
+ reusing the alternate object store mechanism to them only while we
+ decide if we accept the check, and once we decide, either migrate
+ them to the repository or purge them immediately.
+
+ * The require_clean_work_tree() helper was recreated in C when "git
+ pull" was rewritten from shell; the helper is now made available to
+ other callers in preparation for upcoming "rebase -i" work.
+
+ * "git upload-pack" had its code cleaned-up and performance improved
+ by reducing use of timestamp-ordered commit-list, which was
+ replaced with a priority queue.
+
Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
* Clarify various ways to specify the "revision ranges" in the
documentation.
- (merge a117be4 po/range-doc later to maint).
* "diff-highlight" script (in contrib/) learned to work better with
"git log -p --graph" output.
- (merge 3dbfe2b bh/diff-highlight-graph later to maint).
* The test framework left the number of tests and success/failure
count in the t/test-results directory, keyed by the name of the
test script plus the process ID. The latter however turned out not
to serve any useful purpose. The process ID part of the filename
has been removed.
- (merge 5c885c1 jk/test-lib-drop-pid-from-results later to maint).
* Having a submodule whose ".git" repository is somehow corrupt
caused a few commands that recurse into submodules loop forever.
- (merge 10f5c52 jc/submodule-anchor-git-dir later to maint).
* "git symbolic-ref -d HEAD" happily removes the symbolic ref, but
the resulting repository becomes an invalid one. Teach the command
to forbid removal of HEAD.
- (merge 12cfa79 jc/forbid-symbolic-ref-d-HEAD later to maint).
* A test spawned a short-lived background process, which sometimes
prevented the test directory from getting removed at the end of the
script on some platforms.
- (merge 5babb5b js/t6026-clean-up later to maint).
* Update a few tests that used to use GIT_CURL_VERBOSE to use the
newer GIT_TRACE_CURL.
- (merge 14e2411 ep/use-git-trace-curl-in-tests later to maint).
* "git pack-objects --include-tag" was taught that when we know that
we are sending an object C, we want a tag B that directly points at
C but also a tag A that points at the tag B. We used to miss the
intermediate tag B in some cases.
- (merge b773dde jk/pack-tag-of-tag later to maint).
* Update Japanese translation for "git-gui".
- (merge 02748bc sy/git-gui-i18n-ja later to maint).
* "git fetch http::/site/path" did not die correctly and segfaulted
instead.
- (merge d63ed6e jk/fix-remote-curl-url-wo-proto later to maint).
* "git commit-tree" stopped reading commit.gpgsign configuration
variable that was meant for Porcelain "git commit" in Git 2.9; we
forgot to update "git gui" to look at the configuration to match
this change.
- (merge f14a310 js/git-gui-commit-gpgsign later to maint).
+
+ * "git add --chmod=+x" added recently lacked documentation, which has
+ been corrected.
+
+ * "git log --cherry-pick" used to include merge commits as candidates
+ to be matched up with other commits, resulting a lot of wasted time.
+ The patch-id generation logic has been updated to ignore merges to
+ avoid the wastage.
+
+ * The http transport (with curl-multi option, which is the default
+ these days) failed to remove curl-easy handle from a curlm session,
+ which led to unnecessary API failures.
+
+ * There were numerous corner cases in which the configuration files
+ are read and used or not read at all depending on the directory a
+ Git command was run, leading to inconsistent behaviour. The code
+ to set-up repository access at the beginning of a Git process has
+ been updated to fix them.
+ (merge 4d0efa1 jk/setup-sequence-update later to maint).
+
+ * "git diff -W" output needs to extend the context backward to
+ include the header line of the current function and also forward to
+ include the body of the entire current function up to the header
+ line of the next one. This process may have to merge to adjacent
+ hunks, but the code forgot to do so in some cases.
+
+ * Performance tests done via "t/perf" did not use the same set of
+ build configuration if the user relied on autoconf generated
+ configuration.
+
+ * "git format-patch --base=..." feature that was recently added
+ showed the base commit information after "-- " e-mail signature
+ line, which turned out to be inconvenient. The base information
+ has been moved above the signature line.
+
+ * More i18n.
+
+ * Even when "git pull --rebase=preserve" (and the underlying "git
+ rebase --preserve") can complete without creating any new commit
+ (i.e. fast-forwards), it still insisted on having a usable ident
+ information (read: user.email is set correctly), which was less
+ than nice. As the underlying commands used inside "git rebase"
+ would fail with a more meaningful error message and advice text
+ when the bogus ident matters, this extra check was removed.
+
+ * "git gc --aggressive" used to limit the delta-chain length to 250,
+ which is way too deep for gaining additional space savings and is
+ detrimental for runtime performance. The limit has been reduced to
+ 50.
+
+ * Documentation for individual configuration variables to control use
+ of color (like `color.grep`) said that their default value is
+ 'false', instead of saying their default is taken from `color.ui`.
+ When we updated the default value for color.ui from 'false' to
+ 'auto' quite a while ago, all of them broke. This has been
+ corrected.
+
+ * The pretty-format specifier "%C(auto)" used by the "log" family of
+ commands to enable coloring of the output is taught to also issue a
+ color-reset sequence to the output.
+ (merge 82b83da8d3 rs/c-auto-resets-attributes later to maint).
+
+ * A shell script example in check-ref-format documentation has been
+ fixed.
+
+ * "git checkout <word>" does not follow the usual disambiguation
+ rules when the <word> can be both a rev and a path, to allow
+ checking out a branch 'foo' in a project that happens to have a
+ file 'foo' in the working tree without having to disambiguate.
+ This was poorly documented and the check was incorrect when the
+ command was run from a subdirectory.
+
+ * Some codepaths in "git diff" used regexec(3) on a buffer that was
+ mmap(2)ed, which may not have a terminating NUL, leading to a read
+ beyond the end of the mapped region. This was fixed by introducing
+ a regexec_buf() helper that takes a <ptr,len> pair with REG_STARTEND
+ extension.
+ (merge 842a516cb0 js/regexec-buf later to maint).
+
+ * The procedure to build Git on Mac OS X for Travis CI hardcoded the
+ internal directory structure we assumed HomeBrew uses, which was a
+ no-no. The procedure has been updated to ask HomeBrew things we
+ need to know to fix this.
+
+ * When "git rebase -i" is given a broken instruction, it told the
+ user to fix it with "--edit-todo", but didn't say what the step
+ after that was (i.e. "--continue").
+
+ * Documentation around tools to import from CVS was fairly outdated.
+
+ * "git clone --recurse-submodules" lost the progress eye-candy in
+ recent update, which has been corrected.
+
+ * A low-level function verify_packfile() was meant to show errors
+ that were detected without dying itself, but under some conditions
+ it didn't and died instead, which has been fixed.
+
+ * When "git fetch" tries to find where the history of the repository
+ it runs in has diverged from what the other side has, it has a
+ mechanism to avoid digging too deep into irrelevant side branches.
+ This however did not work well over the "smart-http" transport due
+ to a design bug, which has been fixed.
+ (merge 06b3d386e0 jt/fetch-pack-in-vain-count-with-stateless later to maint).
+
+ * In the codepath that comes up with the hostname to be used in an
+ e-mail when the user didn't tell us, we looked at ai_canonname
+ field in struct addrinfo without making sure it is not NULL first.
+
+ * "git worktree", even though it used the default_abbrev setting that
+ ought to be affected by core.abbrev configuration variable, ignored
+ the variable setting. The command has been taught to read the
+ default set of configuration variables to correct this.
+
+ * "git init" tried to record core.worktree in the repository's
+ 'config' file when GIT_WORK_TREE environment variable was set and
+ it was different from where GIT_DIR appears as ".git" at its top,
+ but the logic was faulty when .git is a "gitdir:" file that points
+ at the real place, causing trouble in working trees that are
+ managed by "git worktree". This has been corrected.
+
+ * Codepaths that read from an on-disk loose object were too loose in
+ validating what they are reading is a proper object file and
+ sometimes read past the data they read from the disk, which has
+ been corrected. H/t to Gustavo Grieco for reporting.
+
+ * The original command line syntax for "git merge", which was "git
+ merge <msg> HEAD <parent>...", has been deprecated for quite some
+ time, and "git gui" was the last in-tree user of the syntax. This
+ is finally fixed, so that we can move forward with the deprecation.
+
+ * An author name, that spelled a backslash-quoted double quote in the
+ human readable part "My \"double quoted\" name", was not unquoted
+ correctly while applying a patch from a piece of e-mail.
+
+ * Doc update to clarify what "log -3 --reverse" does.
+
+ * Almost everybody uses DEFAULT_ABBREV to refer to the default
+ setting for the abbreviation, but "git blame" peeked into
+ underlying variable bypassing the macro for no good reason.
+
+ * The "graph" API used in "git log --graph" miscounted the number of
+ output columns consumed so far when drawing a padding line, which
+ has been fixed; this did not affect any existing code as nobody
+ tried to write anything after the padding on such a line, though.
+
+ * The code that parses the format parameter of for-each-ref command
+ has seen a micro-optimization.
+
+ * When we started cURL to talk to imap server when a new enough
+ version of cURL library is available, we forgot to explicitly add
+ imap(s):// before the destination. To some folks, that didn't work
+ and the library tried to make HTTP(s) requests instead.
+ (merge d2d07ab861 ak/curl-imap-send-explicit-scheme later to maint).
+
+ * The ./configure script generated from configure.ac was taught how
+ to detect support of SSL by libcurl better.
+ (merge 924b7eb1c9 dp/autoconf-curl-ssl later to maint).
+
+ * The command-line completion script (in contrib/) learned to
+ complete "git cmd ^mas<HT>" to complete the negative end of
+ reference to "git cmd ^master".
+ (merge 49416ad22a cp/completion-negative-refs later to maint).
+
+ * The existing "git fetch --depth=<n>" option was hard to use
+ correctly when making the history of an existing shallow clone
+ deeper. A new option, "--deepen=<n>", has been added to make this
+ easier to use. "git clone" also learned "--shallow-since=<date>"
+ and "--shallow-exclude=<tag>" options to make it easier to specify
+ "I am interested only in the recent N months worth of history" and
+ "Give me only the history since that version".
+ (merge cccf74e2da nd/shallow-deepen later to maint).
+
+ * It is a common mistake to say "git blame --reverse OLD path",
+ expecting that the command line is dwimmed as if asking how lines
+ in path in an old revision OLD have survived up to the current
+ commit.
+ (merge e1d09701a4 jc/blame-reverse later to maint).
+
+ * http.emptyauth configuration is a way to allow an empty username to
+ pass when attempting to authenticate using mechanisms like
+ Kerberos. We took an unspecified (NULL) username and sent ":"
+ (i.e. no username, no password) to CURLOPT_USERPWD, but did not do
+ the same when the username is explicitly set to an empty string.
+ (merge 5275c3081c dt/http-empty-auth later to maint).
+
+ * "git clone" of a local repository can be done at the filesystem
+ level, but the codepath did not check errors while copying and
+ adjusting the file that lists alternate object stores.
+ (merge 22d3b8de1b jk/clone-copy-alternates-fix later to maint).
+
+ * Documentation for "git commit" was updated to clarify that "commit
+ -p <paths>" adds to the current contents of the index to come up
+ with what to commit.
+ (merge 7431596ab1 nd/commit-p-doc later to maint).
+
+ * A stray symbolic link in $GIT_DIR/refs/ directory could make name
+ resolution loop forever, which has been corrected.
+ (merge e8c42cb9ce jk/ref-symlink-loop later to maint).
+
+ * The "submodule.<name>.path" stored in .gitmodules is never copied
+ to .git/config and such a key in .git/config has no meaning, but
+ the documentation described it and submodule.<name>.url next to
+ each other as if both belong to .git/config. This has been fixed.
+ (merge 72710165c9 sb/submodule-config-doc-drop-path later to maint).
+
+ * In a worktree connected to a repository elsewhere, created via "git
+ worktree", "git checkout" attempts to protect users from confusion
+ by refusing to check out a branch that is already checked out in
+ another worktree. However, this also prevented checking out a
+ branch, which is designated as the primary branch of a bare
+ reopsitory, in a worktree that is connected to the bare
+ repository. The check has been corrected to allow it.
+ (merge 171c646f8c dk/worktree-dup-checkout-with-bare-is-ok later to maint).
+
+ * "git rebase" immediately after "git clone" failed to find the fork
+ point from the upstream.
+ (merge 4f21454b55 jk/merge-base-fork-point-without-reflog later to maint).
+
+ * When fetching from a remote that has many tags that are irrelevant
+ to branches we are following, we used to waste way too many cycles
+ when checking if the object pointed at by a tag (that we are not
+ going to fetch!) exists in our repository too carefully.
+ (merge 5827a03545 jk/fetch-quick-tag-following later to maint).
+
+ * Protect our code from over-eager compilers.
+ (merge 0ac52a38e8 jk/tighten-alloc later to maint).
+
+ * Recent git allows submodule.<name>.branch to use a special token
+ "." instead of the branch name; the documentation has been updated
+ to describe it.
+ (merge 15ef78008a bw/submodule-branch-dot-doc later to maint).
+
+ * A hot-fix for a test added by a recent topic that went to both
+ 'master' and 'maint' already.
+ (merge 76e368c378 tg/add-chmod+x-fix later to maint).
+
+ * "git send-email" attempts to pick up valid e-mails from the
+ trailers, but people in real world write non-addresses there, like
+ "Cc: Stable <add@re.ss> # 4.8+", which broke the output depending
+ on the availability and vintage of Mail::Address perl module.
+ (merge dcfafc5214 mm/send-email-cc-cruft-after-address later to maint).
+
+ * The Travis CI configuration we ship ran the tests with --verbose
+ option but this risks non-TAP output that happens to be "ok" to be
+ misinterpreted as TAP signalling a test that passed. This resulted
+ in unnecessary failure. This has been corrected by introducing a
+ new mode to run our tests in the test harness to send the verbose
+ output separately to the log file.
+ (merge 614fe01521 jk/tap-verbose-fix later to maint).
+
+ * Some AsciiDoc formatter mishandles a displayed illustration with
+ tabs in it. Adjust a few of them in merge-base documentation to
+ work around them.
+ (merge 6750f62699 po/fix-doc-merge-base-illustration later to maint).
* Other minor doc, test and build updates and code cleanups.
- (merge 3e1952e jk/squelch-false-warning-from-gcc-o3 later to maint).
- (merge ca2baa3 rs/compat-strdup later to maint).
- (merge d233097 rs/hex2chr later to maint).
- (merge c00bfc9 js/t9903-chaining later to maint).
- (merge 5e4e5bb sb/xdiff-remove-unused-static-decl later to maint).
- (merge 5cb5fe4 sb/transport-report-missing-submodule-on-stderr later to maint).
- (merge a1c8044 ah/misc-message-fixes later to maint).
- (merge ca9b37e sb/diff-cleanup later to maint).
+ (merge a94bb68397 rs/cocci later to maint).
+ (merge 641c900b2c js/reset-usage later to maint).
+ (merge 30cfe72d37 rs/pretty-format-color-doc-fix later to maint).
+ (merge d709f1fb9d jc/diff-unique-abbrev-comments later to maint).
+ (merge 13092a916d jc/cocci-xstrdup-or-null later to maint).
+ (merge 86009f32bb pb/test-parse-options-expect later to maint).
+ (merge 749a2279a4 yk/git-tag-remove-mention-of-old-layout-in-doc later to maint).