Documentation / RelNotes / 2.14.0.txton commit Merge branch 'sb/hashmap-customize-comparison' into sb/diff-color-move (2cfb6ce)
   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   mechansim 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
  98Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.
  99
 100 * The default packed-git limit value has been raised on larger
 101   platforms to save "git fetch" from a (recoverable) failure while
 102   "gc" is running in parallel.
 103
 104 * Code to update the cache-tree has been tightened so that we won't
 105   accidentally write out any 0{40} entry in the tree object.
 106
 107 * Attempt to allow us notice "fishy" situation where we fail to
 108   remove the temporary directory used during the test.
 109
 110 * Travis CI gained a task to format the documentation with both
 111   AsciiDoc and AsciiDoctor.
 112
 113 * Some platforms have ulong that is smaller than time_t, and our
 114   historical use of ulong for timestamp would mean they cannot
 115   represent some timestamp that the platform allows.  Invent a
 116   separate and dedicated timestamp_t (so that we can distingiuish
 117   timestamps and a vanilla ulongs, which along is already a good
 118   move), and then declare uintmax_t is the type to be used as the
 119   timestamp_t.
 120
 121 * We can trigger Windows auto-build tester (credits: Dscho &
 122   Microsoft) from our existing Travis CI tester now.
 123
 124 * Conversion from uchar[20] to struct object_id continues.
 125
 126 * Simplify parse_pathspec() codepath and stop it from looking at the
 127   default in-core index.
 128
 129 * Add perf-test for wildmatch.
 130
 131 * Code from "conversion using external process" codepath has been
 132   extracted to a separate sub-process.[ch] module.
 133
 134 * When "git checkout", "git merge", etc. manipulates the in-core
 135   index, various pieces of information in the index extensions are
 136   discarded from the original state, as it is usually not the case
 137   that they are kept up-to-date and in-sync with the operation on the
 138   main index.  The untracked cache extension is copied across these
 139   operations now, which would speed up "git status" (as long as the
 140   cache is properly invalidated).
 141
 142 * The internal implementation of "git grep" has seen some clean-up.
 143
 144 * Update the C style recommendation for notes for translators, as
 145   recent versions of gettext tools can work with our style of
 146   multi-line comments.
 147
 148 * The implementation of "ref" API around the "packed refs" have been
 149   cleaned up, in preparation for further changes.
 150
 151 * The internal logic used in "git blame" has been libified to make it
 152   easier to use by cgit.
 153
 154 * Our code often opens a path to an optional file, to work on its
 155   contents when we can successfully open it.  We can ignore a failure
 156   to open if such an optional file does not exist, but we do want to
 157   report a failure in opening for other reasons (e.g. we got an I/O
 158   error, or the file is there, but we lack the permission to open).
 159
 160   The exact errors we need to ignore are ENOENT (obviously) and
 161   ENOTDIR (less obvious).  Instead of repeating comparison of errno
 162   with these two constants, introduce a helper function to do so.
 163
 164 * We often try to open a file for reading whose existence is
 165   optional, and silently ignore errors from open/fopen; report such
 166   errors if they are not due to missing files.
 167
 168 * When an existing repository is used for t/perf testing, we first
 169   create bit-for-bit copy of it, which may grab a transient state of
 170   the repository and freeze it into the repository used for testing,
 171   which then may cause Git operations to fail.  Single out "the index
 172   being locked" case and forcibly drop the lock from the copy.
 173
 174 * Three instances of the same helper function have been consolidated
 175   to one.
 176
 177 * "fast-import" uses a default pack chain depth that is consistent
 178   with other parts of the system.
 179
 180 * A new test to show the interaction between the pattern [^a-z]
 181   (which matches '/') and a slash in a path has been added.  The
 182   pattern should not match the slash with "pathmatch", but should
 183   with "wildmatch".
 184
 185 * The 'diff-highlight' program (in contrib/) has been restructured
 186   for easier reuse by an external project 'diff-so-fancy'.
 187   (merge 0c977dbc81 jk/diff-highlight-module later to maint).
 188
 189 * A common pattern to free a piece of memory and assign NULL to the
 190   pointer that used to point at it has been replaced with a new
 191   FREE_AND_NULL() macro.
 192
 193
 194Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
 195
 196
 197Fixes since v2.13
 198-----------------
 199
 200Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.13 in the maintenance
 201track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases'
 202notes for details).
 203
 204 * "git gc" did not interact well with "git worktree"-managed
 205   per-worktree refs.
 206
 207 * "git cherry-pick" and other uses of the sequencer machinery
 208   mishandled a trailer block whose last line is an incomplete line.
 209   This has been fixed so that an additional sign-off etc. are added
 210   after completing the existing incomplete line.
 211
 212 * The codepath in "git am" that is used when running "git rebase"
 213   leaked memory held for the log message of the commits being rebased.
 214
 215 * "git clone --config var=val" is a way to populate the
 216   per-repository configuration file of the new repository, but it did
 217   not work well when val is an empty string.  This has been fixed.
 218
 219 * Setting "log.decorate=false" in the configuration file did not take
 220   effect in v2.13, which has been corrected.
 221
 222 * A few codepaths in "checkout" and "am" working on an unborn branch
 223   tried to access an uninitialized piece of memory.
 224
 225 * The Web interface to gmane news archive is long gone, even though
 226   the articles are still accessible via NTTP.  Replace the links with
 227   ones to public-inbox.org.  Because their message identification is
 228   based on the actual message-id, it is likely that it will be easier
 229   to migrate away from it if/when necessary.
 230
 231 * The receive-pack program now makes sure that the push certificate
 232   records the same set of push options used for pushing.
 233
 234 * Tests have been updated to pass under GETTEXT_POISON (a mechanism
 235   to ensure that output strings that should not be translated are
 236   not translated by mistake), and TravisCI is told to run them.
 237
 238 * "git checkout --recurse-submodules" did not quite work with a
 239   submodule that itself has submodules.
 240
 241 * "pack-objects" can stream a slice of an existing packfile out when
 242   the pack bitmap can tell that the reachable objects are all needed
 243   in the output, without inspecting individual objects.  This
 244   strategy however would not work well when "--local" and other
 245   options are in use, and need to be disabled.
 246
 247 * Fix memory leaks pointed out by Coverity (and people).
 248
 249 * "git read-tree -m" (no tree-ish) gave a nonsense suggestion "use
 250   --empty if you want to clear the index".  With "-m", such a request
 251   will still fail anyway, as you'd need to name at least one tree-ish
 252   to be merged.
 253
 254 * Make sure our tests would pass when the sources are checked out
 255   with "platform native" line ending convention by default on
 256   Windows.  Some "text" files out tests use and the test scripts
 257   themselves that are meant to be run with /bin/sh, ought to be
 258   checked out with eol=LF even on Windows.
 259
 260 * Introduce the BUG() macro to improve die("BUG: ...").
 261
 262 * Clarify documentation for include.path and includeIf.<condition>.path
 263   configuration variables.
 264
 265 * Git sometimes gives an advice in a rhetorical question that does
 266   not require an answer, which can confuse new users and non native
 267   speakers.  Attempt to rephrase them.
 268
 269 * A few http:// links that are redirected to https:// in the
 270   documentation have been updated to https:// links.
 271
 272 * "git for-each-ref --format=..." with %(HEAD) in the format used to
 273   resolve the HEAD symref as many times as it had processed refs,
 274   which was wasteful, and "git branch" shared the same problem.
 275
 276 * Regression fix to topic recently merged to 'master'.
 277
 278 * The shell completion script (in contrib/) learned "git stash" has
 279   a new "push" subcommand.
 280
 281 * "git interpret-trailers", when used as GIT_EDITOR for "git commit
 282   -v", looked for and appended to a trailer block at the very end,
 283   i.e. at the end of the "diff" output.  The command has been
 284   corrected to pay attention to the cut-mark line "commit -v" adds to
 285   the buffer---the real trailer block should appear just before it.
 286
 287 * A test allowed both "git push" and "git receive-pack" on the other
 288   end write their traces into the same file.  This is OK on platforms
 289   that allows atomically appending to a file opened with O_APPEND,
 290   but on other platforms led to a mangled output, causing
 291   intermittent test failures.  This has been fixed by disabling
 292   traces from "receive-pack" in the test.
 293
 294 * Tag objects, which are not reachable from any ref, that point at
 295   missing objects were mishandled by "git gc" and friends (they
 296   should silently be ignored instead)
 297
 298 * "git describe --contains" penalized light-weight tags so much that
 299   they were almost never considered.  Instead, give them about the
 300   same chance to be considered as an annotated tag that is the same
 301   age as the underlying commit would.
 302
 303 * The "run-command" API implementation has been made more robust
 304   against dead-locking in a threaded environment.
 305
 306 * A recent update to t5545-push-options.sh started skipping all the
 307   tests in the script when a web server testing is disabled or
 308   unavailable, not just the ones that require a web server.  Non HTTP
 309   tests have been salvaged to always run in this script.
 310
 311 * "git send-email" now uses Net::SMTP::SSL, which is obsolete, only
 312   when needed.  Recent versions of Net::SMTP can do TLS natively.
 313
 314 * "foo\bar\baz" in "git fetch foo\bar\baz", even though there is no
 315   slashes in it, cannot be a nickname for a remote on Windows, as
 316   that is likely to be a pathname on a local filesystem.
 317
 318 * "git clean -d" used to clean directories that has ignored files,
 319   even though the command should not lose ignored ones without "-x".
 320   "git status --ignored"  did not list ignored and untracked files
 321   without "-uall".  These have been corrected.
 322
 323 * The result from "git diff" that compares two blobs, e.g. "git diff
 324   $commit1:$path $commit2:$path", used to be shown with the full
 325   object name as given on the command line, but it is more natural to
 326   use the $path in the output and use it to look up .gitattributes.
 327
 328 * The "collision detecting" SHA-1 implementation shipped with 2.13
 329   was quite broken on some big-endian platforms and/or platforms that
 330   do not like unaligned fetches.  Update to the upstream code which
 331   has already fixed these issues.
 332
 333 * "git am -h" triggered a BUG().
 334
 335 * The interaction of "url.*.insteadOf" and custom URL scheme's
 336   whitelisting is now documented better.
 337
 338 * The timestamp of the index file is now taken after the file is
 339   closed, to help Windows, on which a stale timestamp is reported by
 340   fstat() on a file that is opened for writing and data was written
 341   but not yet closed.
 342
 343 * "git pull --rebase --autostash" didn't auto-stash when the local history
 344   fast-forwards to the upstream.
 345
 346 * A flaky test has been corrected.
 347
 348 * "git $cmd -h" for builtin commands calls the implementation of the
 349   command (i.e. cmd_$cmd() function) without doing any repository
 350   set-up, and the commands that expect RUN_SETUP is done by the Git
 351   potty needs to be prepared to show the help text without barfing.
 352   (merge d691551192 jk/consistent-h later to maint).
 353
 354 * Help contributors that visit us at GitHub.
 355
 356 * "git stash push <pathspec>" did not work from a subdirectory at all.
 357   Bugfix for a topic in v2.13
 358
 359 * As there is no portable way to pass timezone information to
 360   strftime, some output format from "git log" and friends are
 361   impossible to produce.  Teach our own strbuf_addftime to replace %z
 362   and %Z with caller-supplied values to help working around this.
 363   (merge 6eced3ec5e rs/strbuf-addftime-zZ later to maint).
 364
 365 * "git mergetool" learned to work around a wrapper MacOS X adds
 366   around underlying meld.
 367   (merge 0af85f84bd da/mergetools-meld-output-opt-on-macos later to maint).
 368
 369 * An example in documentation that does not work in multi worktree
 370   configuration has been corrected.
 371   (merge 773a88914f ah/doc-gitattributes-empty-index later to maint).
 372
 373 * The pretty-format specifiers like '%h', '%t', etc. had an
 374   optimization that no longer works correctly.  In preparation/hope
 375   of getting it correctly implemented, first discard the optimization
 376   that is broken.
 377   (merge fe9e2aefd4 rs/pretty-add-again later to maint).
 378
 379 * The code to pick up and execute command alias definition from the
 380   configuration used to switch to the top of the working tree and
 381   then come back when the expanded alias was executed, which was
 382   unnecessarilyl complex.  Attempt to simplify the logic by using the
 383   early-config mechanism that does not chdir around.
 384   (merge a9bcf6586d js/alias-early-config later to maint).
 385
 386 * Fix configuration codepath to pay proper attention to commondir
 387   that is used in multi-worktree situation, and isolate config API
 388   into its own header file.
 389   (merge dc8441fdb4 bw/config-h later to maint).
 390
 391 * "git add -p" were updated in 2.12 timeframe to cope with custom
 392   core.commentchar but the implementation was buggy and a
 393   metacharacter like $ and * did not work.
 394   (merge d85d7ecb80 jk/add-p-commentchar-fix later to maint).
 395
 396 * Other minor doc, test and build updates and code cleanups.
 397   (merge 68241cb9dd sb/t4005-modernize later to maint).
 398   (merge 4fced24712 ks/t7508-indent-fix later to maint).
 399   (merge 968b1fe263 mb/reword-autocomplete-message later to maint).