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"' by
+ mistake (when the user meant to give "$path"), 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).
+
+ * The default abbreviation length, which has historically been 7, now
+ scales as the repository grows, using the approximate number of
+ objects in the repository and a bit of math around the birthday
+ paradox. The logic suggests to use 12 hexdigits for the Linux
+ kernel, and 9 to 10 for Git itself.
+
+
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.
which was not intuitive, given that "git nosuchcommand" said "git:
'nosuchcommand' is not a git command".
- * "git clone --resurse-submodules --reference $path $URL" is a way to
+ * "git clone --recurse-submodules --reference $path $URL" is a way to
reduce network transfer cost by borrowing objects in an existing
$path repository when cloning the superproject from $URL; it
- learned to also peek into $path for presense of corresponding
+ learned to also peek into $path for presence of corresponding
repositories of submodules and borrow objects from there when able.
* The "git diff --submodule={short,log}" mechanism has been enhanced
* 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.
+ can perform "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
+ it has had this 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,
+ store and externalizes it for 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
+ * Output from "git diff" can be made easier to read by intelligently 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.
+ when the lines before and after the changed section
+ are the same. A command line option (--indent-heuristic) and a
+ configuration variable (diff.indentHeuristic) are added to help with the
+ experiment to find 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"
+ new format-patch option "--rfc" is 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
+ * "git add --chmod={+,-}x <pathspec>" only changed 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
+ been corrected to change 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
+ header and it uses RFC2822 header folding, "git am" fails 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
+ to guess the language 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
+ "ambiguous argument". This error is now accompanied by a hint that
+ lists the objects beginning 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.
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.
+ disabled by default due to CVE-2011-2192; introduce a http.delegation
+ configuration variable 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 (diff.wsErrorHighlight) to set it by default.
+
+ * "git ls-files" learned the "--recurse-submodules" option
+ to get a listing of tracked files across submodules (i.e. this
+ only works with the "--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 by the "%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.
+
+ * "git commit" created an empty commit when invoked with an index
+ consisting solely of intend-to-add paths (added with "git add -N").
+ It now requires the "--allow-empty" option to create such a commit.
+ The same logic prevented "git status" from showing such paths as "new files" in the
+ "Changes not staged for commit" section.
+
+ * The smudge/clean filter API spawns an external process
+ to filter the contents of each path that has a filter defined. A
+ new type of "process" filter API has been added to allow the first
+ request to run the filter for a path to spawn a single process, and
+ all filtering is served by this single process for multiple
+ paths, reducing the process creation overhead.
+
+ * The user always has to say "stash@{$N}" when naming a single
+ element in the default location of the stash, i.e. reflogs in
+ refs/stash. The "git stash" command learned to accept "git stash
+ apply 4" as a short-hand for "git stash apply stash@{4}".
+
Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.
script file "git am" internally uses.
(merge a77598e jc/am-read-author-file later to maint).
- * Lifts calls to exit(2) and die() higher in the callchain in
+ * Lift calls to exit(2) and die() higher in the callchain in
sequencer.c files so that more helper functions in it can be used
by callers that want to handle error conditions themselves.
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
+ repository at that URL", but we may have seen other advertisements
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
+ existing pack bitmap; now they are and as a result they have
become faster.
* The codepath in "git fsck" to detect malformed tree objects has
packfile first.
(merge c9af708b1a jk/pack-objects-optim-mru later to maint).
+ * Codepaths involved in interacting alternate object stores 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" expire them. 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.
+
+ * "git diff --no-index" codepath has been updated not to try to peek
+ into a .git/ directory that happens to be under the current
+ directory, when we know we are operating outside any repository.
+
+ * Update of the sequencer codebase to make it reusable to reimplement
+ "rebase -i" continues.
+
+ * Git generally does not explicitly close file descriptors that were
+ open in the parent process when spawning a child process, but most
+ of the time the child does not want to access them. As Windows does
+ not allow removing or renaming a file that has a file descriptor
+ open, a slow-to-exit child can even break the parent process by
+ holding onto them. Use O_CLOEXEC flag to open files in various
+ codepaths.
+
+ * Update "interpret-trailers" machinery and teach it that people in
+ the real world write all sorts of cruft in the "trailer" that was
+ originally designed to have the neat-o "Mail-Header: like thing"
+ and nothing else.
+
Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
has been removed.
* Having a submodule whose ".git" repository is somehow corrupt
- caused a few commands that recurse into submodules loop forever.
+ caused a few commands that recurse into submodules to loop forever.
* "git symbolic-ref -d HEAD" happily removes the symbolic ref, but
the resulting repository becomes an invalid one. Teach the command
forgot to update "git gui" to look at the configuration to match
this change.
- * "git add --chmod=+x" added recently lacked documentation, which has
+ * "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
+ The patch-id generation logic has been updated to ignore merges and
avoid the wastage.
* The http transport (with curl-multi option, which is the default
* "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
+ line of the next one. This process may have to merge two adjacent
hunks, but the code forgot to do so in some cases.
- (merge 45d2f75 rs/xdiff-merge-overlapping-hunks-for-W-context later to maint).
- * Performance tests done via "t/perf" did not use the same set of
+ * Performance tests done via "t/perf" did not use the right
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
+ showed the base commit information after the "-- " e-mail signature
line, which turned out to be inconvenient. The base information
has been moved above the signature line.
* More i18n.
- (merge 43073f8 va/i18n later to maint).
* 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
+ rebase --preserve") can complete without creating any new commits
+ (i.e. fast-forwards), it still insisted on having 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
* 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 c99ad27 rs/c-auto-resets-attributes later to maint).
* A shell script example in check-ref-format documentation has been
fixed.
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 b7d36ff 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
* 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 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.
- (merge a9445d859e jk/verify-packfile-gently later to maint).
* 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
+ e-mail when the user didn't tell us, we looked at the 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
+ ought to be affected by the core.abbrev configuration variable, ignored
the variable setting. The command has been taught to read the
default set of configuration variables to correct this.
- (merge d49028e6e7 jc/worktree-config later to maint).
* "git init" tried to record core.worktree in the repository's
- 'config' file when GIT_WORK_TREE environment variable was set and
+ 'config' file when the 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
+ validating that they are reading 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.
- (merge d21f842690 jc/verify-loose-object-header later to maint).
* 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.
- (merge ff65e796f0 rs/git-gui-use-modern-git-merge-syntax later to maint).
- * An author name, that spelled a backslash-quoted double quote in the
- human readable part "My \"double quoted\" name", was not unquoted
+ * An author name that has 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.
- (merge f357e5de31 kd/mailinfo-quoted-string later to maint).
* Doc update to clarify what "log -3 --reverse" does.
- (merge 04be69478f pb/rev-list-reverse-with-count later to maint).
* 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.
- (merge 5293284b4d jc/blame-abbrev later to maint).
* 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.
- (merge 1647793524 jk/graph-padding-fix later to maint).
- * The code that parses the format parameter of for-each-ref command
+ * The code that parses the format parameter of the for-each-ref command
has seen a micro-optimization.
- (merge e94ce1394e sg/ref-filter-parse-optim later to maint).
- * When we started cURL to talk to imap server when a new enough
- version of cURL library is available, we forgot to explicitly add
+ * When we started to use cURL to talk to an imap server, 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
"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
+ * "git blame --reverse OLD path" is now DWIMmed to show how lines
in path in an old revision OLD have survived up to the current
commit.
(merge e1d09701a4 jc/blame-reverse later to maint).
+ * The http.emptyauth configuration variable 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.
+
+ * "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.
+
+ * 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.
+
+ * A stray symbolic link in the $GIT_DIR/refs/ directory could make name
+ resolution loop forever, which has been corrected.
+
+ * 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 next to submodule.<name>.url
+ as if both belong to .git/config. This has been fixed.
+
+ * In a worktree 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
+ repository, in a worktree that is connected to the bare
+ repository. The check has been corrected to allow it.
+
+ * "git rebase" immediately after "git clone" failed to find the fork
+ point from the upstream.
+
+ * 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
+ checking if the object pointed at by a tag (that we are not
+ going to fetch!) exists in our repository too carefully.
+
+ * Protect our code from over-eager compilers.
+
+ * Recent git allows submodule.<name>.branch to use a special token
+ "." instead of the branch name; the documentation has been updated
+ to describe it.
+
+ * "git send-email" attempts to pick up valid e-mails from the
+ trailers, but people in the 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 the 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 the --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 failures. 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.
+
+ * Some AsciiDoc formatters mishandle a displayed illustration with
+ tabs in it. Adjust a few of them in merge-base documentation to
+ work around them.
+
+ * Fixed a minor regression in "git submodule" that was introduced
+ when more helper functions were reimplemented in C.
+ (merge 77b63ac31e sb/submodule-ignore-trailing-slash later to maint).
+
+ * The code that we have used for the past 10+ years to cycle
+ 4-element ring buffers turns out to be not quite portable in
+ theoretical world.
+ (merge bb84735c80 rs/ring-buffer-wraparound later to maint).
+
+ * "git daemon" used fixed-length buffers to turn URLs to the
+ repository the client asked for into the server side directory
+ paths, using snprintf() to avoid overflowing these buffers, but
+ allowed possibly truncated paths to the directory. This has been
+ tightened to reject such a request that causes an overlong path to be
+ served.
+ (merge 6bdb0083be jk/daemon-path-ok-check-truncation later to maint).
+
+ * Recent update to git-sh-setup (a library of shell functions that
+ are used by our in-tree scripted Porcelain commands) included
+ another shell library git-sh-i18n without specifying where it is,
+ relying on the $PATH. This has been fixed to be more explicit by
+ prefixing with $(git --exec-path) output.
+ (merge 1073094f30 ak/sh-setup-dot-source-i18n-fix later to maint).
+
+ * Fix for a racy false-positive test failure.
+ (merge fdf4f6c79b as/merge-attr-sleep later to maint).
+
+ * Portability update and workaround for builds on recent Mac OS X.
+ (merge a296bc0132 ls/macos-update later to maint).
+
+ * Using a %(HEAD) placeholder in "for-each-ref --format=" option
+ caused the command to segfault when on an unborn branch.
+ (merge 84679d470d jc/for-each-ref-head-segfault-fix later to maint).
+
+ * "git rebase -i" did not work well with the core.commentchar
+ configuration variable for two reasons, both of which have been
+ fixed.
+ (merge 882cd23777 js/rebase-i-commentchar-fix later to maint).
+
* Other minor doc, test and build updates and code cleanups.
- (merge a22ae75 rs/cocci later to maint).
- (merge 45ccef87b3 rs/copy-array later to maint).
- (merge 8201688ecd dt/mailinfo later to maint).
+ (merge 5c238e29a8 jk/common-main later to maint).
+ (merge 5a5749e45b ak/pre-receive-hook-template-modefix later to maint).
+ (merge 6d834ac8f1 jk/rebase-config-insn-fmt-docfix later to maint).
+ (merge de9f7fa3b0 rs/commit-pptr-simplify later to maint).
+ (merge 4259d693fc sc/fmt-merge-msg-doc-markup-fix later to maint).
+ (merge 28fab7b23d nd/test-helpers later to maint).
+ (merge c2bb0c1d1e rs/cocci later to maint).
+ (merge 3285b7badb ps/common-info-doc later to maint).
+ (merge 2b090822e8 nd/worktree-lock later to maint).
+ (merge 4bd488ea7c jk/create-branch-remove-unused-param later to maint).
+ (merge 974e0044d6 tk/diffcore-delta-remove-unused later to maint).