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 intelligently selecting
+ which lines are common and which lines are added/deleted
+ 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 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>" only changed the
+ executable bit for paths that are either new or modified. This has
+ 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 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 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 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.
+
+ * "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 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
+ 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 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
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
+ * "git add --chmod={+,-}x" added recently lacked documentation, which has
been corrected.
- (merge 7ef7903 et/add-chmod-x later to maint).
* "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.
- (merge 7c81040 jk/patch-ids-no-merges later to maint).
* 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.
- (merge 2abc848 ew/http-do-not-forget-to-call-curl-multi-remove-handle later to maint).
* 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 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.
- (merge cd5c281 ks/perf-build-with-autoconf later to maint).
* "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.
- (merge 480871e jt/format-patch-base-info-above-sig later to maint).
* 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
when the bogus ident matters, this extra check was removed.
- (merge 1e461c4 jk/rebase-i-drop-ident-check later to maint).
* "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.
- (merge 07e7dbf jk/reduce-gc-aggressive-depth later to maint).
+
+ * 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.
+
+ * 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.
+
+ * 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
+ 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.
+
+ * 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.
+
+ * 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 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 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.
+
+ * "git init" tried to record core.worktree in the repository's
+ '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 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.
+
+ * 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 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.
+
+ * 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 the for-each-ref command
+ has seen a micro-optimization.
+
+ * 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.
+
+ * The ./configure script generated from configure.ac was taught how
+ to detect support of SSL by libcurl better.
+
+ * 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).
+
+ * "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 e78d57e bw/pathspec-remove-unused-extern-decl later to maint).
- (merge ce25e4c rs/checkout-some-states-are-const later to maint).
- (merge a8342a4 rs/strbuf-remove-fix later to maint).
- (merge b56aa5b rs/unpack-trees-reduce-file-scope-global later to maint).
- (merge 5efc60c mr/vcs-svn-printf-ulong 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).