1Git 2.14 Release Notes 2====================== 3 4Backward compatibility notes. 5 6 * Use of an empty string as a pathspec element that is used for 7 'everything matches' is still warned and Git asks users to use a 8 more explicit '.' for that instead. The hope is that existing 9 users will not mind this change, and eventually the warning can be 10 turned into a hard error, upgrading the deprecation into removal of 11 this (mis)feature. That is not scheduled to happen in the upcoming 12 release (yet). 13 14 * Git now avoids blindly falling back to ".git" when the setup 15 sequence said we are _not_ in Git repository. A corner case that 16 happens to work right now may be broken by a call to die("BUG"). 17 We've tried hard to locate such cases and fixed them, but there 18 might still be cases that need to be addressed--bug reports are 19 greatly appreciated. 20 21 * The experiment to improve the hunk-boundary selection of textual 22 diff output has finished, and the "indent heuristics" has now 23 become the default. 24 25 26Updates since v2.13 27------------------- 28 29UI, Workflows & Features 30 31 * The colors in which "git status --short --branch" showed the names 32 of the current branch and its remote-tracking branch are now 33 configurable. 34 35 * "git clone" learned the "--no-tags" option not to fetch all tags 36 initially, and also set up the tagopt not to follow any tags in 37 subsequent fetches. 38 39 * "git archive --format=zip" learned to use zip64 extension when 40 necessary to go beyond the 4GB limit. 41 42 * "git reset" learned "--recurse-submodules" option. 43 44 * "git diff --submodule=diff" now recurses into nested submodules. 45 46 * "git repack" learned to accept the --threads=<n> option and pass it 47 to pack-objects. 48 49 * "git send-email" learned to run sendemail-validate hook to inspect 50 and reject a message before sending it out. 51 52 * There is no good reason why "git fetch $there $sha1" should fail 53 when the $sha1 names an object at the tip of an advertised ref, 54 even when the other side hasn't enabled allowTipSHA1InWant. 55 56 * The recently introduced "[includeIf "gitdir:$dir"] path=..." 57 mechanism has further been taught to take symlinks into account. 58 The directory "$dir" specified in "gitdir:$dir" may be a symlink to 59 a real location, not something that $(getcwd) may return. In such 60 a case, a realpath of "$dir" is compared with the real path of the 61 current repository to determine if the contents from the named path 62 should be included. 63 64 * Make the "indent" heuristics the default in "diff" and diff.indentHeuristics 65 configuration variable an escape hatch for those who do no want it. 66 67 * Many commands learned to pay attention to submodule.recurse 68 configuration. 69 70 * The convention for a command line is to follow "git cmdname 71 --options" with revisions followed by an optional "--" 72 disambiguator and then finally pathspecs. When "--" is not there, 73 we make sure early ones are all interpretable as revs (and do not 74 look like paths) and later ones are the other way around. A 75 pathspec with "magic" (e.g. ":/p/a/t/h" that matches p/a/t/h from 76 the top-level of the working tree, no matter what subdirectory you 77 are working from) are conservatively judged as "not a path", which 78 required disambiguation more often. The command line parser 79 learned to say "it's a pathspec" a bit more often when the syntax 80 looks like so. 81 82 * Update "perl-compatible regular expression" support to enable JIT 83 and also allow linking with the newer PCRE v2 library. 84 85 * "filter-branch" learned a pseudo filter "--setup" that can be used 86 to define common functions/variables that can be used by other 87 filters. 88 89 * Using "git add d/i/r" when d/i/r is the top of the working tree of 90 a separate repository would create a gitlink in the index, which 91 would appear as a not-quite-initialized submodule to others. We 92 learned to give warnings when this happens. 93 94 * "git status" learned to optionally give how many stash entries the 95 user has in its output. 96 97 * "git status" has long shown essentially the same message as "git 98 commit"; the message it gives while preparing for the root commit, 99 i.e. "Initial commit", was hard to understand for some new users. 100 Now it says "No commits yet" to stress more on the current status 101 (rather than the commit the user is preparing for, which is more in 102 line with the focus of "git commit"). 103 104 * "git send-email" learned to overcome some SMTP server limitation 105 that does not allow many pieces of e-mails to be sent over a single 106 session. 107 108 * An old message shown in the commit log template was removed, as it 109 has outlived its usefulness. 110 111 112Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc. 113 114 * The default packed-git limit value has been raised on larger 115 platforms to save "git fetch" from a (recoverable) failure while 116 "gc" is running in parallel. 117 118 * Code to update the cache-tree has been tightened so that we won't 119 accidentally write out any 0{40} entry in the tree object. 120 121 * Attempt to allow us notice "fishy" situation where we fail to 122 remove the temporary directory used during the test. 123 124 * Travis CI gained a task to format the documentation with both 125 AsciiDoc and AsciiDoctor. 126 127 * Some platforms have ulong that is smaller than time_t, and our 128 historical use of ulong for timestamp would mean they cannot 129 represent some timestamp that the platform allows. Invent a 130 separate and dedicated timestamp_t (so that we can distingiuish 131 timestamps and a vanilla ulongs, which along is already a good 132 move), and then declare uintmax_t is the type to be used as the 133 timestamp_t. 134 135 * We can trigger Windows auto-build tester (credits: Dscho & 136 Microsoft) from our existing Travis CI tester now. 137 138 * Conversion from uchar[20] to struct object_id continues. 139 140 * Simplify parse_pathspec() codepath and stop it from looking at the 141 default in-core index. 142 143 * Add perf-test for wildmatch. 144 145 * Code from "conversion using external process" codepath has been 146 extracted to a separate sub-process.[ch] module. 147 148 * When "git checkout", "git merge", etc. manipulates the in-core 149 index, various pieces of information in the index extensions are 150 discarded from the original state, as it is usually not the case 151 that they are kept up-to-date and in-sync with the operation on the 152 main index. The untracked cache extension is copied across these 153 operations now, which would speed up "git status" (as long as the 154 cache is properly invalidated). 155 156 * The internal implementation of "git grep" has seen some clean-up. 157 158 * Update the C style recommendation for notes for translators, as 159 recent versions of gettext tools can work with our style of 160 multi-line comments. 161 162 * The implementation of "ref" API around the "packed refs" have been 163 cleaned up, in preparation for further changes. 164 165 * The internal logic used in "git blame" has been libified to make it 166 easier to use by cgit. 167 168 * Our code often opens a path to an optional file, to work on its 169 contents when we can successfully open it. We can ignore a failure 170 to open if such an optional file does not exist, but we do want to 171 report a failure in opening for other reasons (e.g. we got an I/O 172 error, or the file is there, but we lack the permission to open). 173 174 The exact errors we need to ignore are ENOENT (obviously) and 175 ENOTDIR (less obvious). Instead of repeating comparison of errno 176 with these two constants, introduce a helper function to do so. 177 178 * We often try to open a file for reading whose existence is 179 optional, and silently ignore errors from open/fopen; report such 180 errors if they are not due to missing files. 181 182 * When an existing repository is used for t/perf testing, we first 183 create bit-for-bit copy of it, which may grab a transient state of 184 the repository and freeze it into the repository used for testing, 185 which then may cause Git operations to fail. Single out "the index 186 being locked" case and forcibly drop the lock from the copy. 187 188 * Three instances of the same helper function have been consolidated 189 to one. 190 191 * "fast-import" uses a default pack chain depth that is consistent 192 with other parts of the system. 193 194 * A new test to show the interaction between the pattern [^a-z] 195 (which matches '/') and a slash in a path has been added. The 196 pattern should not match the slash with "pathmatch", but should 197 with "wildmatch". 198 199 * The 'diff-highlight' program (in contrib/) has been restructured 200 for easier reuse by an external project 'diff-so-fancy'. 201 202 * A common pattern to free a piece of memory and assign NULL to the 203 pointer that used to point at it has been replaced with a new 204 FREE_AND_NULL() macro. 205 206 * Traditionally, the default die() routine had a code to prevent it 207 from getting called multiple times, which interacted badly when a 208 threaded program used it (one downside is that the real error may 209 be hidden and instead the only error message given to the user may 210 end up being "die recursion detected", which is not very useful). 211 212 * Introduce a "repository" object to eventually make it easier to 213 work in multiple repositories (the primary focus is to work with 214 the superproject and its submodules) in a single process. 215 216 * Optimize "what are the object names already taken in an alternate 217 object database?" query that is used to derive the length of prefix 218 an object name is uniquely abbreviated to. 219 220 221Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups. 222 223 224Fixes since v2.13 225----------------- 226 227Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.13 in the maintenance 228track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases' 229notes for details). 230 231 * "git gc" did not interact well with "git worktree"-managed 232 per-worktree refs. 233 234 * "git cherry-pick" and other uses of the sequencer machinery 235 mishandled a trailer block whose last line is an incomplete line. 236 This has been fixed so that an additional sign-off etc. are added 237 after completing the existing incomplete line. 238 239 * The codepath in "git am" that is used when running "git rebase" 240 leaked memory held for the log message of the commits being rebased. 241 242 * "git clone --config var=val" is a way to populate the 243 per-repository configuration file of the new repository, but it did 244 not work well when val is an empty string. This has been fixed. 245 246 * Setting "log.decorate=false" in the configuration file did not take 247 effect in v2.13, which has been corrected. 248 249 * A few codepaths in "checkout" and "am" working on an unborn branch 250 tried to access an uninitialized piece of memory. 251 252 * The Web interface to gmane news archive is long gone, even though 253 the articles are still accessible via NTTP. Replace the links with 254 ones to public-inbox.org. Because their message identification is 255 based on the actual message-id, it is likely that it will be easier 256 to migrate away from it if/when necessary. 257 258 * The receive-pack program now makes sure that the push certificate 259 records the same set of push options used for pushing. 260 261 * Tests have been updated to pass under GETTEXT_POISON (a mechanism 262 to ensure that output strings that should not be translated are 263 not translated by mistake), and TravisCI is told to run them. 264 265 * "git checkout --recurse-submodules" did not quite work with a 266 submodule that itself has submodules. 267 268 * "pack-objects" can stream a slice of an existing packfile out when 269 the pack bitmap can tell that the reachable objects are all needed 270 in the output, without inspecting individual objects. This 271 strategy however would not work well when "--local" and other 272 options are in use, and need to be disabled. 273 274 * Fix memory leaks pointed out by Coverity (and people). 275 276 * "git read-tree -m" (no tree-ish) gave a nonsense suggestion "use 277 --empty if you want to clear the index". With "-m", such a request 278 will still fail anyway, as you'd need to name at least one tree-ish 279 to be merged. 280 281 * Make sure our tests would pass when the sources are checked out 282 with "platform native" line ending convention by default on 283 Windows. Some "text" files out tests use and the test scripts 284 themselves that are meant to be run with /bin/sh, ought to be 285 checked out with eol=LF even on Windows. 286 287 * Introduce the BUG() macro to improve die("BUG: ..."). 288 289 * Clarify documentation for include.path and includeIf.<condition>.path 290 configuration variables. 291 292 * Git sometimes gives an advice in a rhetorical question that does 293 not require an answer, which can confuse new users and non native 294 speakers. Attempt to rephrase them. 295 296 * A few http:// links that are redirected to https:// in the 297 documentation have been updated to https:// links. 298 299 * "git for-each-ref --format=..." with %(HEAD) in the format used to 300 resolve the HEAD symref as many times as it had processed refs, 301 which was wasteful, and "git branch" shared the same problem. 302 303 * Regression fix to topic recently merged to 'master'. 304 305 * The shell completion script (in contrib/) learned "git stash" has 306 a new "push" subcommand. 307 308 * "git interpret-trailers", when used as GIT_EDITOR for "git commit 309 -v", looked for and appended to a trailer block at the very end, 310 i.e. at the end of the "diff" output. The command has been 311 corrected to pay attention to the cut-mark line "commit -v" adds to 312 the buffer---the real trailer block should appear just before it. 313 314 * A test allowed both "git push" and "git receive-pack" on the other 315 end write their traces into the same file. This is OK on platforms 316 that allows atomically appending to a file opened with O_APPEND, 317 but on other platforms led to a mangled output, causing 318 intermittent test failures. This has been fixed by disabling 319 traces from "receive-pack" in the test. 320 321 * Tag objects, which are not reachable from any ref, that point at 322 missing objects were mishandled by "git gc" and friends (they 323 should silently be ignored instead) 324 325 * "git describe --contains" penalized light-weight tags so much that 326 they were almost never considered. Instead, give them about the 327 same chance to be considered as an annotated tag that is the same 328 age as the underlying commit would. 329 330 * The "run-command" API implementation has been made more robust 331 against dead-locking in a threaded environment. 332 333 * A recent update to t5545-push-options.sh started skipping all the 334 tests in the script when a web server testing is disabled or 335 unavailable, not just the ones that require a web server. Non HTTP 336 tests have been salvaged to always run in this script. 337 338 * "git send-email" now uses Net::SMTP::SSL, which is obsolete, only 339 when needed. Recent versions of Net::SMTP can do TLS natively. 340 341 * "foo\bar\baz" in "git fetch foo\bar\baz", even though there is no 342 slashes in it, cannot be a nickname for a remote on Windows, as 343 that is likely to be a pathname on a local filesystem. 344 345 * "git clean -d" used to clean directories that has ignored files, 346 even though the command should not lose ignored ones without "-x". 347 "git status --ignored" did not list ignored and untracked files 348 without "-uall". These have been corrected. 349 350 * The result from "git diff" that compares two blobs, e.g. "git diff 351 $commit1:$path $commit2:$path", used to be shown with the full 352 object name as given on the command line, but it is more natural to 353 use the $path in the output and use it to look up .gitattributes. 354 355 * The "collision detecting" SHA-1 implementation shipped with 2.13 356 was quite broken on some big-endian platforms and/or platforms that 357 do not like unaligned fetches. Update to the upstream code which 358 has already fixed these issues. 359 360 * "git am -h" triggered a BUG(). 361 362 * The interaction of "url.*.insteadOf" and custom URL scheme's 363 whitelisting is now documented better. 364 365 * The timestamp of the index file is now taken after the file is 366 closed, to help Windows, on which a stale timestamp is reported by 367 fstat() on a file that is opened for writing and data was written 368 but not yet closed. 369 370 * "git pull --rebase --autostash" didn't auto-stash when the local history 371 fast-forwards to the upstream. 372 373 * A flaky test has been corrected. 374 375 * "git $cmd -h" for builtin commands calls the implementation of the 376 command (i.e. cmd_$cmd() function) without doing any repository 377 set-up, and the commands that expect RUN_SETUP is done by the Git 378 potty needs to be prepared to show the help text without barfing. 379 (merge d691551192 jk/consistent-h later to maint). 380 381 * Help contributors that visit us at GitHub. 382 383 * "git stash push <pathspec>" did not work from a subdirectory at all. 384 Bugfix for a topic in v2.13 385 386 * As there is no portable way to pass timezone information to 387 strftime, some output format from "git log" and friends are 388 impossible to produce. Teach our own strbuf_addftime to replace %z 389 and %Z with caller-supplied values to help working around this. 390 (merge 6eced3ec5e rs/strbuf-addftime-zZ later to maint). 391 392 * "git mergetool" learned to work around a wrapper MacOS X adds 393 around underlying meld. 394 395 * An example in documentation that does not work in multi worktree 396 configuration has been corrected. 397 398 * The pretty-format specifiers like '%h', '%t', etc. had an 399 optimization that no longer works correctly. In preparation/hope 400 of getting it correctly implemented, first discard the optimization 401 that is broken. 402 403 * The code to pick up and execute command alias definition from the 404 configuration used to switch to the top of the working tree and 405 then come back when the expanded alias was executed, which was 406 unnecessarilyl complex. Attempt to simplify the logic by using the 407 early-config mechanism that does not chdir around. 408 409 * Fix configuration codepath to pay proper attention to commondir 410 that is used in multi-worktree situation, and isolate config API 411 into its own header file. 412 (merge dc8441fdb4 bw/config-h later to maint). 413 414 * "git add -p" were updated in 2.12 timeframe to cope with custom 415 core.commentchar but the implementation was buggy and a 416 metacharacter like $ and * did not work. 417 418 * A recent regression in "git rebase -i" has been fixed and tests 419 that would have caught it and others have been added. 420 421 * An unaligned 32-bit access in pack-bitmap code ahs been corrected. 422 423 * Tighten error checks for invalid "git apply" input. 424 425 * The split index code did not honor core.sharedrepository setting 426 correctly. 427 428 * The Makefile rule in contrib/subtree for building documentation 429 learned to honour USE_ASCIIDOCTOR just like the main documentation 430 set does. 431 432 * Update the sha1dc again to fix portability glitches. 433 434 * Code clean-up to fix possible buffer over-reading. 435 (merge 8bc172e5f2 rs/apply-avoid-over-reading later to maint). 436 437 * A few tests that tried to verify the contents of push certificates 438 did not use 'git rev-parse' to formulate the line to look for in 439 the certificate correctly. 440 441 * Update the character width tables. 442 (merge 7560aacd7c bb/unicode-10.0 later to maint). 443 444 * After "git branch --move" of the currently checked out branch, the 445 code to walk the reflog of HEAD via "log -g" and friends 446 incorrectly stopped at the reflog entry that records the renaming 447 of the branch. 448 (merge e30d463d45 jk/reflog-walk-maint later to maint). 449 450 * Other minor doc, test and build updates and code cleanups. 451 (merge 3f9c637ec7 pw/unquote-path-in-git-pm later to maint). 452 (merge 669638fe7a ks/typofix-commit-c-comment later to maint).