Git 2.14 Release Notes
======================
-Backward compatibility notes.
+Backward compatibility notes and other notable changes.
* 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
diff output has finished, and the "indent heuristics" has now
become the default.
+ * Git can now be built with PCRE v2 instead of v1 of the PCRE
+ library. Replace USE_LIBPCRE=YesPlease with USE_LIBPCRE2=YesPlease
+ in existing build scripts to build against the new version. As the
+ upstream PCRE maintainer has abandoned v1 maintenance for all but
+ the most critical bug fixes, use of v2 is recommended.
+
Updates since v2.13
-------------------
* "git archive --format=zip" learned to use zip64 extension when
necessary to go beyond the 4GB limit.
- (merge 867e40ff3a rs/large-zip later to maint).
* "git reset" learned "--recurse-submodules" option.
* "git diff --submodule=diff" now recurses into nested submodules.
- (merge 5a5221427c jk/diff-submodule-diff-inline later to maint).
* "git repack" learned to accept the --threads=<n> option and pass it
to pack-objects.
* "git send-email" learned to run sendemail-validate hook to inspect
and reject a message before sending it out.
- (merge 177409e589 jt/send-email-validate-hook later to maint).
* There is no good reason why "git fetch $there $sha1" should fail
when the $sha1 names an object at the tip of an advertised ref,
even when the other side hasn't enabled allowTipSHA1InWant.
- * The recently introduced "[includeIf "gitdir:$dir"] path=..."
- mechansim has further been taught to take symlinks into account.
- The directory "$dir" specified in "gitdir:$dir" may be a symlink to
- a real location, not something that $(getcwd) may return. In such
- a case, a realpath of "$dir" is compared with the real path of the
- current repository to determine if the contents from the named path
- should be included.
+ * The "[includeIf "gitdir:$dir"] path=..." mechanism introduced in
+ 2.13.0 would canonicalize the path of the gitdir being matched,
+ and did not match e.g. "gitdir:~/work/*" against a repo in
+ "~/work/main" if "~/work" was a symlink to "/mnt/storage/work".
+ Now we match both the resolved canonical path and what "pwd" would
+ show. The include will happen if either one matches.
- * Make the "indent" heuristics the default in "diff" and diff.indentHeuristics
- configuration variable an escape hatch for those who do no want it.
+ * The "indent" heuristics is now the default in "diff". The
+ diff.indentHeuristic configuration variable can be set to "false"
+ for those who do not want it.
* Many commands learned to pay attention to submodule.recurse
configuration.
required disambiguation more often. The command line parser
learned to say "it's a pathspec" a bit more often when the syntax
looks like so.
- (merge 2cb47ab695 jk/pathspec-magic-disambiguation later to maint).
* Update "perl-compatible regular expression" support to enable JIT
and also allow linking with the newer PCRE v2 library.
* "filter-branch" learned a pseudo filter "--setup" that can be used
- to define a common function/variable that can be used by other
+ to define common functions/variables that can be used by other
filters.
+ * Using "git add d/i/r" when d/i/r is the top of the working tree of
+ a separate repository would create a gitlink in the index, which
+ would appear as a not-quite-initialized submodule to others. We
+ learned to give warnings when this happens.
+
+ * "git status" learned to optionally give how many stash entries there
+ are in its output.
+
+ * "git status" has long shown essentially the same message as "git
+ commit"; the message it gives while preparing for the root commit,
+ i.e. "Initial commit", was hard to understand for some new users.
+ Now it says "No commits yet" to stress more on the current status
+ (rather than the commit the user is preparing for, which is more in
+ line with the focus of "git commit").
+
+ * "git send-email" now has --batch-size and --relogin-delay options
+ which can be used to overcome limitations on SMTP servers that
+ restrict on how many of e-mails can be sent in a single session.
+
+ * An old message shown in the commit log template was removed, as it
+ has outlived its usefulness.
+
+ * "git pull --rebase --recurse-submodules" learns to rebase the
+ branch in the submodules to an updated base.
+
+ * "git log" learned -P as a synonym for --perl-regexp, "git grep"
+ already had such a synonym.
+
+ * "git log" didn't understand --regexp-ignore-case when combined with
+ --perl-regexp. This has been fixed.
Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.
* Code to update the cache-tree has been tightened so that we won't
accidentally write out any 0{40} entry in the tree object.
- (merge a96d3cc3f6 jk/no-null-sha1-in-cache-tree later to maint).
* Attempt to allow us notice "fishy" situation where we fail to
remove the temporary directory used during the test.
* Simplify parse_pathspec() codepath and stop it from looking at the
default in-core index.
- (merge 08de9151a8 bw/pathspec-sans-the-index later to maint).
* Add perf-test for wildmatch.
- (merge 62ca75a6b9 ab/perf-wildmatch later to maint).
* Code from "conversion using external process" codepath has been
extracted to a separate sub-process.[ch] module.
- (merge 4f2a2e9f0e bp/sub-process-convert-filter later to maint).
* When "git checkout", "git merge", etc. manipulates the in-core
index, various pieces of information in the index extensions are
cache is properly invalidated).
* The internal implementation of "git grep" has seen some clean-up.
- (merge 8df4c2953f ab/grep-preparatory-cleanup later to maint).
* Update the C style recommendation for notes for translators, as
recent versions of gettext tools can work with our style of
* Three instances of the same helper function have been consolidated
to one.
- (merge e0556a928f pc/dir-count-slashes later to maint).
* "fast-import" uses a default pack chain depth that is consistent
with other parts of the system.
+ * A new test to show the interaction between the pattern [^a-z]
+ (which matches '/') and a slash in a path has been added. The
+ pattern should not match the slash with "pathmatch", but should
+ with "wildmatch".
+
+ * The 'diff-highlight' program (in contrib/) has been restructured
+ for easier reuse by an external project 'diff-so-fancy'.
+
+ * A common pattern to free a piece of memory and assign NULL to the
+ pointer that used to point at it has been replaced with a new
+ FREE_AND_NULL() macro.
+
+ * Traditionally, the default die() routine had a code to prevent it
+ from getting called multiple times, which interacted badly when a
+ threaded program used it (one downside is that the real error may
+ be hidden and instead the only error message given to the user may
+ end up being "die recursion detected", which is not very useful).
+
+ * Introduce a "repository" object to eventually make it easier to
+ work in multiple repositories (the primary focus is to work with
+ the superproject and its submodules) in a single process.
+
+ * Optimize "what are the object names already taken in an alternate
+ object database?" query that is used to derive the length of prefix
+ an object name is uniquely abbreviated to.
+
+ * The hashmap API has been updated so that data to customize the
+ behaviour of the comparison function can be specified at the time a
+ hashmap is initialized.
+
+ * The "collision detecting" SHA-1 implementation shipped with 2.13 is
+ now integrated into git.git as a submodule (the first submodule to
+ ship with git.git). Clone git.git with --recurse-submodules to get
+ it. For now a non-submodule copy of the same code is also shipped
+ as part of the tree.
+
+ * A recent update made it easier to use "-fsanitize=" option while
+ compiling but supported only one sanitize option. Allow more than
+ one to be combined, joined with a comma, like "make SANITIZE=foo,bar".
+
+ * Use "p4 -G" to make "p4 changes" output more Python-friendly
+ to parse.
+
+ * We started using "%" PRItime, imitating "%" PRIuMAX and friends, as
+ a way to format the internal timestamp value, but this does not
+ play well with gettext(1) i18n framework, and causes "make pot"
+ that is run by the l10n coordinator to create a broken po/git.pot
+ file. This is a possible workaround for that problem.
+
+ * It turns out that Cygwin also needs the fopen() wrapper that
+ returns failure when a directory is opened for reading.
Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
* "git checkout --recurse-submodules" did not quite work with a
submodule that itself has submodules.
- * Plug some leaks and updates internal API used to implement the
- split index feature to make it easier to avoid such a leak in the
- future.
- (merge de950c5773 nd/split-index-unshare later to maint).
-
* "pack-objects" can stream a slice of an existing packfile out when
the pack bitmap can tell that the reachable objects are all needed
in the output, without inspecting individual objects. This
they were almost never considered. Instead, give them about the
same chance to be considered as an annotated tag that is the same
age as the underlying commit would.
- (merge ef1e74065c jc/name-rev-lw-tag later to maint).
* The "run-command" API implementation has been made more robust
against dead-locking in a threaded environment.
$commit1:$path $commit2:$path", used to be shown with the full
object name as given on the command line, but it is more natural to
use the $path in the output and use it to look up .gitattributes.
- (merge 30d005c020 jk/diff-blob later to maint).
* The "collision detecting" SHA-1 implementation shipped with 2.13
was quite broken on some big-endian platforms and/or platforms that
fast-forwards to the upstream.
* A flaky test has been corrected.
- (merge 7c2115aa07 jk/pack-idx-corruption-safety later to maint).
* "git $cmd -h" for builtin commands calls the implementation of the
command (i.e. cmd_$cmd() function) without doing any repository
(merge d691551192 jk/consistent-h later to maint).
* Help contributors that visit us at GitHub.
- (merge 0b1bb0c032 ls/github later to maint).
* "git stash push <pathspec>" did not work from a subdirectory at all.
Bugfix for a topic in v2.13
- (merge 22fc703ec9 ps/stash-push-pathspec-fix later to maint).
* As there is no portable way to pass timezone information to
strftime, some output format from "git log" and friends are
and %Z with caller-supplied values to help working around this.
(merge 6eced3ec5e rs/strbuf-addftime-zZ later to maint).
+ * "git mergetool" learned to work around a wrapper MacOS X adds
+ around underlying meld.
+
+ * An example in documentation that does not work in multi worktree
+ configuration has been corrected.
+
+ * The pretty-format specifiers like '%h', '%t', etc. had an
+ optimization that no longer works correctly. In preparation/hope
+ of getting it correctly implemented, first discard the optimization
+ that is broken.
+
+ * The code to pick up and execute command alias definition from the
+ configuration used to switch to the top of the working tree and
+ then come back when the expanded alias was executed, which was
+ unnecessarilyl complex. Attempt to simplify the logic by using the
+ early-config mechanism that does not chdir around.
+
+ * Fix configuration codepath to pay proper attention to commondir
+ that is used in multi-worktree situation, and isolate config API
+ into its own header file.
+ (merge dc8441fdb4 bw/config-h later to maint).
+
+ * "git add -p" were updated in 2.12 timeframe to cope with custom
+ core.commentchar but the implementation was buggy and a
+ metacharacter like $ and * did not work.
+
+ * A recent regression in "git rebase -i" has been fixed and tests
+ that would have caught it and others have been added.
+
+ * An unaligned 32-bit access in pack-bitmap code has been corrected.
+
+ * Tighten error checks for invalid "git apply" input.
+
+ * The split index code did not honor core.sharedRepository setting
+ correctly.
+
+ * The Makefile rule in contrib/subtree for building documentation
+ learned to honour USE_ASCIIDOCTOR just like the main documentation
+ set does.
+
+ * Code clean-up to fix possible buffer over-reading.
+ (merge 2d105451c0 rs/apply-avoid-over-reading later to maint).
+
+ * A few tests that tried to verify the contents of push certificates
+ did not use 'git rev-parse' to formulate the line to look for in
+ the certificate correctly.
+
+ * Update the character width tables.
+ (merge 7560aacd7c bb/unicode-10.0 later to maint).
+
+ * After "git branch --move" of the currently checked out branch, the
+ code to walk the reflog of HEAD via "log -g" and friends
+ incorrectly stopped at the reflog entry that records the renaming
+ of the branch.
+
+ * The rewrite of "git branch --list" using for-each-ref's internals
+ that happened in v2.13 regressed its handling of color.branch.local;
+ this has been fixed.
+
+ * The build procedure has been improved to allow building and testing
+ Git with address sanitizer more easily.
+ (merge 425ca6710b jk/build-with-asan later to maint).
+
+ * On Cygwin, similar to Windows, "git push //server/share/repository"
+ ought to mean a repository on a network share that can be accessed
+ locally, but this did not work correctly due to stripping the double
+ slashes at the beginning.
+ (merge 496f256989 tb/push-to-cygwin-unc-path later to maint).
+
+ * The progress meter did not give a useful output when we haven't had
+ 0.5 seconds to measure the throughput during the interval. Instead
+ show the overall throughput rate at the end, which is a much more
+ useful number.
+ (merge 0fae1e072a rs/progress-overall-throughput-at-the-end later to maint).
+
+ * Code clean-up, that makes us in sync with Debian by one patch.
+ (merge 8db1ae5740 jn/hooks-pre-rebase-sample-fix later to maint).
+
+ * We run an early part of "git gc" that deals with refs before
+ daemonising (and not under lock) even when running a background
+ auto-gc, which caused multiple gc processes attempting to run the
+ early part at the same time. This is now prevented by running the
+ early part also under the GC lock.
+ (merge c45af94dbc jk/gc-pre-detach-under-hook later to maint).
+
+ * A recent update broke an alias that contained an uppercase letter.
+ (merge 643df7e234 js/alias-case-sensitivity later to maint).
+
* Other minor doc, test and build updates and code cleanups.
- (merge 8ba74bfd7c jc/diff-tree-stale-comment later to maint).
- (merge 68602c01fd sb/submodule-rm-absorb later to maint).
- (merge 68241cb9dd sb/t4005-modernize later to maint).
- (merge ae52d57f0b km/test-mailinfo-b-failure later to maint).
- (merge 8b1d9136e1 sg/revision-parser-skip-prefix later to maint).
- (merge bb8efa1772 sd/t3200-branch-m-test later to maint).
+ (merge 3f9c637ec7 pw/unquote-path-in-git-pm later to maint).
+ (merge 5053313562 rs/urlmatch-cleanup later to maint).
+ (merge 42c78a216e rs/use-div-round-up later to maint).
+ (merge 5e8d2729ae rs/wt-status-cleanup later to maint).
+ (merge 01826066b0 ks/fix-rebase-doc-picture later to maint).
+ (merge f7f6dc340e jk/test-copy-bytes-fix later to maint).
+ (merge 9fb9495dae ew/fd-cloexec-fix later to maint).
+ (merge 3a33fe5c97 ks/doc-fixes later to maint).