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 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.
* 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.
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.
- (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
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
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.
- (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
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
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
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
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.
- (merge 14d16e2 mm/config-color-ui-default-to-auto later to maint).
* 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).
+ (merge 82b83da8d3 rs/c-auto-resets-attributes later to maint).
* A shell script example in check-ref-format documentation has been
fixed.
- (merge 92dece7 ep/doc-check-ref-format-example later to maint).
* "git checkout <word>" does not follow the usual disambiguation
rules when the <word> can be both a rev and a path, to allow
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.
- (merge b829b94 nd/checkout-disambiguation later to maint).
* 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 b7d36ff js/regexec-buf later to maint).
+ (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.
- (merge f86f49b ls/travis-homebrew-path-fix later to maint).
* 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").
- (merge 37875b4 rt/rebase-i-broken-insn-advise later to maint).
* Documentation around tools to import from CVS was fairly outdated.
- (merge 106b672 jk/doc-cvs-update later to maint).
* "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.
- (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
* 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.
- (merge c375a7efa3 jk/ident-ai-canonname-could-be-null later to maint).
* "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.
- (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
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.
- (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
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
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
+ 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 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 a22ae75 rs/cocci later to maint).
- (merge 45ccef87b3 rs/copy-array later to maint).
- (merge 8201688ecd dt/mailinfo 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).