Documentation / RelNotes / 2.1.0.txton commit refs.c: remove the update_ref_write function (04ad622)
   1Git v2.1 Release Notes
   2======================
   3
   4Backward compatibility notes
   5----------------------------
   6
   7 * The default value we give to the environment variable LESS has been
   8   changed from "FRSX" to "FRX", losing "S" (chop long lines instead
   9   of wrapping).  Existing users who prefer not to see line-wrapped
  10   output may want to set
  11
  12     $ git config core.pager "less -S"
  13
  14   to restore the traditional behaviour.  It is expected that people
  15   find output from the most subcommands easier to read with the new
  16   default, except for "blame" which tends to produce really long
  17   lines.  To override the new default only for "git blame", you can
  18   do this:
  19
  20     $ git config pager.blame "less -S"
  21
  22 * A few disused directories in contrib/ have been retired.
  23
  24
  25Updates since v2.0
  26------------------
  27
  28UI, Workflows & Features
  29
  30 * Since the very beginning of Git, we gave the LESS environment a
  31   default value "FRSX" when we spawn "less" as the pager.  "S" (chop
  32   long lines instead of wrapping) has been removed from this default
  33   set of options, because it is more or less a personal taste thing,
  34   as opposed to others that have good justifications (i.e. "R" is
  35   very much justified because many kinds of output we produce are
  36   colored and "FX" is justified because output we produce is often
  37   shorter than a page).
  38
  39 * The logic and data used to compute the display width needed for
  40   UTF-8 strings have been updated to match Unicode 6.3 better.
  41
  42 * HTTP-based transports learned to propagate the error messages from
  43   the webserver better to the client coming over the HTTP transport.
  44
  45 * The "core.preloadindex" configuration variable is by default
  46   enabled, allowing modern platforms to take advantage of the
  47   multiple cores they have.
  48
  49 * "git commit --date=<date>" option learned to read from more
  50   timestamp formats, including "--date=now".
  51
  52 * The `core.commentChar` configuration variable is used to specify a
  53   custom comment character other than the default "#" to be used in
  54   the commit log editor.  This can be set to `auto` to attempt to
  55   choose a different character that does not conflict with what
  56   already starts a line in the message being edited for cases like
  57   "git commit --amend".
  58
  59 * "git format-patch" learned --signature-file=<file> to take the mail
  60   signature from.
  61
  62 * "git grep" learned grep.fullname configuration variable to force
  63   "--full-name" to be default.  This may cause regressions on
  64   scripted users that do not expect this new behaviour.
  65
  66 * "git imap-send" learned to ask the credential helper for auth
  67   material.
  68
  69 * "git log" and friends now understand the value "auto" set to the
  70   "log.decorate" configuration variable to enable the "--decorate"
  71   option automatically when the output is sent to tty.
  72
  73 * "git merge" without argument, even when there is an upstream
  74   defined for the current branch, refused to run until
  75   merge.defaultToUpstream is set to true.  Flip the default of that
  76   configuration variable to true.
  77
  78 * "git mergetool" learned to drive the vimdiff3 backend.
  79
  80 * mergetool.prompt used to default to 'true', always asking "do you
  81   really want to run the tool on this path?".  Among the two
  82   purposes this prompt serves, ignore the use case to confirm that
  83   the user wants to view particular path with the named tool, and
  84   redefine the meaning of the prompt only to confirm the choice of
  85   the tool made by the autodetection (for those who configured the
  86   tool explicitly, the prompt shown for the latter purpose is
  87   simply annoying).
  88
  89   Strictly speaking, this is a backward incompatible change and the
  90   users need to explicitly set the variable to 'true' if they want
  91   to resurrect the now-ignored use case.
  92
  93 * "git replace" learned the "--edit" subcommand.
  94
  95 * "git svn" learned to cope with malformed timestamps with only one
  96   digit in the hour part, e.g. 2014-01-07T5:01:02.048176Z, emitted
  97   by some broken subversion server implementations.
  98
  99 * "git tag" when editing the tag message shows the name of the tag
 100   being edited as a comment in the editor.
 101
 102
 103Performance, Internal Implementation, etc.
 104
 105 * Build procedure for 'subtree' (in contrib/) has been cleaned up.
 106
 107 * The `core.deltabasecachelimit` used to default to 16 MiB , but this
 108   proved to be too small, and has been bumped to 96 MiB.
 109
 110 * "git blame" has been optimized greatly by reorganising the data
 111   structure that is used to keep track of the work to be done.
 112
 113 * "git diff" that compares 3-or-more trees (e.g. parents and the
 114   result of a merge) have been optimized.
 115
 116 * The API to update/delete references are being converted to handle
 117   updates to multiple references in a transactional way.  As an
 118   example, "update-ref --stdin [-z]" has been updated to use this
 119   API.
 120
 121 * Parts of the test scripts can be skipped by using a range notation,
 122   e.g. "sh t1234-test.sh --run='1-4 6 8-'" to omit test piece 5 and 7
 123   and run everything else.
 124
 125
 126Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
 127
 128
 129Fixes since v2.0
 130----------------
 131
 132Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.0 in the maintenance
 133track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases'
 134notes for details).
 135
 136 * We used to unconditionally disable the pager in the pager process
 137   we spawn to feed out output, but that prevented people who want to
 138   run "less" within "less" from doing so.
 139   (merge c0459ca je/pager-do-not-recurse later to maint).
 140
 141 * Tools that read diagnostic output in our standard error stream do
 142   not want to see terminal control sequence (e.g. erase-to-eol).
 143   Detect them by checking if the standard error stream is connected
 144   to a tty.
 145   (merge 38de156 mn/sideband-no-ansi later to maint).
 146
 147 * Mishandling of patterns in .gitignore that has trailing SPs quoted
 148   with backslashes (e.g. ones that end with "\ ") have been
 149   corrected.
 150   (merge e61a6c1 pb/trim-trailing-spaces later to maint).
 151
 152 * Reworded the error message given upon a failure to open an existing
 153   loose object file due to e.g. permission issues; it was reported as
 154   the object being corrupt, but that is not quite true.
 155   (merge d6c8a05 jk/report-fail-to-read-objects-better later to maint).
 156
 157 * The "%<(10,trunc)%s" pretty format specifier in the log family of
 158   commands is used to truncate the string to a given length (e.g. 10
 159   in the example) with padding to column-align the output, but did
 160   not take into account that number of bytes and number of display
 161   columns are different.
 162   (merge 7d50987 as/pretty-truncate later to maint).
 163
 164 * The "mailmap.file" configuration option did not support the tilde
 165   expansion (i.e. ~user/path and ~/path).
 166   (merge 9352fd5 ow/config-mailmap-pathname later to maint).
 167
 168 * The completion scripts (in contrib/) did not know about quite a few
 169   options that are common between "git merge" and "git pull", and a
 170   couple of options unique to "git merge".
 171   (merge 8fee872 jk/complete-merge-pull later to maint).
 172
 173 * "--ignore-space-change" option of "git apply" ignored the spaces
 174   at the beginning of line too aggressively, which is inconsistent
 175   with the option of the same name "diff" and "git diff" have.
 176   (merge 14d3bb4 jc/apply-ignore-whitespace later to maint).
 177
 178 * "git blame" miscounted number of columns needed to show localized
 179   timestamps, resulting in jaggy left-side-edge of the source code
 180   lines in its output.
 181   (merge dd75553 jx/blame-align-relative-time later to maint).
 182
 183 * "git blame" assigned the blame to the copy in the working-tree if
 184   the repository is set to core.autocrlf=input and the file used CRLF
 185   line endings.
 186   (merge 4d4813a bc/blame-crlf-test later to maint).
 187
 188 * "git commit --allow-empty-messag -C $commit" did not work when the
 189   commit did not have any log message.
 190   (merge 076cbd6 jk/commit-C-pick-empty later to maint).
 191
 192 * "git diff --find-copies-harder" sometimes pretended as if the mode
 193   bits have changed for paths that are marked with assume-unchanged
 194   bit.
 195   (merge 5304810 jk/diff-files-assume-unchanged later to maint).
 196
 197 * "git format-patch" did not enforce the rule that the "--follow"
 198   option from the log/diff family of commands must be used with
 199   exactly one pathspec.
 200   (merge dd63f16 jk/diff-follow-must-take-one-pathspec later to maint).
 201
 202 * "git gc --auto" was recently changed to run in the background to
 203   give control back early to the end-user sitting in front of the
 204   terminal, but it forgot that housekeeping involving reflogs should
 205   be done without other processes competing for accesses to the refs.
 206   (merge 62aad18 nd/daemonize-gc later to maint).
 207
 208 * "git grep -O" to show the lines that hit in the pager did not work
 209   well with case insensitive search.  We now spawn "less" with its
 210   "-I" option when it is used as the pager (which is the default).
 211   (merge f7febbe sk/spawn-less-case-insensitively-from-grep-O-i later to maint).
 212
 213 * We used to disable threaded "git index-pack" on platforms without
 214   thread-safe pread(); use a different workaround for such
 215   platforms to allow threaded "git index-pack".
 216   (merge 3953949 nd/index-pack-one-fd-per-thread later to maint).
 217
 218 * The error reporting from "git index-pack" has been improved to
 219   distinguish missing objects from type errors.
 220   (merge 77583e7 jk/index-pack-report-missing later to maint).
 221
 222 * "git mailinfo" used to read beyond the end of header string while
 223   parsing an incoming e-mail message to extract the patch.
 224   (merge b1a013d rs/mailinfo-header-cmp later to maint).
 225
 226 * On a case insensitive filesystem, merge-recursive incorrectly
 227   deleted the file that is to be renamed to a name that is the same
 228   except for case differences.
 229   (merge baa37bf dt/merge-recursive-case-insensitive later to maint).
 230
 231 * "git pack-objects" unnecessarily copied the previous contents when
 232   extending the hashtable, even though it will populate the table
 233   from scratch anyway.
 234   (merge fb79947 rs/pack-objects-no-unnecessary-realloc later to maint).
 235
 236 * "git rerere forget" did not work well when merge.conflictstyle
 237   was set to a non-default value.
 238   (merge de3d8bb fc/rerere-conflict-style later to maint).
 239
 240 * "git remote rm" and "git remote prune" can involve removing many
 241   refs at once, which is not a very efficient thing to do when very
 242   many refs exist in the packed-refs file.
 243   (merge e6bea66 jl/remote-rm-prune later to maint).
 244
 245 * "git log --exclude=<glob> --all | git shortlog" worked as expected,
 246   but "git shortlog --exclude=<glob> --all", which is supposed to be
 247   identical to the above pipeline, was not accepted at the command
 248   line argument parser level.
 249   (merge eb07774 jc/shortlog-ref-exclude later to maint).
 250
 251 * The autostash mode of "git rebase -i" did not restore the dirty
 252   working tree state if the user aborted the interactive rebase by
 253   emptying the insn sheet.
 254   (merge ddb5432 rr/rebase-autostash-fix later to maint).
 255
 256 * "git show -s" (i.e. show log message only) used to incorrectly emit
 257   an extra blank line after a merge commit.
 258   (merge ad2f725 mk/show-s-no-extra-blank-line-for-merges later to maint).
 259
 260 * "git status", even though it is a read-only operation, tries to
 261   update the index with refreshed lstat(2) info to optimize future
 262   accesses to the working tree opportunistically, but this could
 263   race with a "read-write" operation that modify the index while it
 264   is running.  Detect such a race and avoid overwriting the index.
 265   (merge 426ddee ym/fix-opportunistic-index-update-race later to maint).
 266
 267 * "git status" (and "git commit") behaved as if changes in a modified
 268   submodule are not there if submodule.*.ignore configuration is set,
 269   which was misleading.  The configuration is only to unclutter diff
 270   output during the course of development, and should not to hide
 271   changes in the "status" output to cause the users forget to commit
 272   them.
 273   (merge c215d3d jl/status-added-submodule-is-never-ignored later to maint).
 274
 275 * "git update-index --cacheinfo" in 2.0 release crashed on a
 276   malformed command line.
 277   (merge c8e1ee4 jc/rev-parse-argh-dashed-multi-words later to maint).
 278
 279 * The mode to run tests with HTTP server tests disabled was broken.
 280   (merge afa53fe na/no-http-test-in-the-middle later to maint).