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 109Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc. 110 111 * The default packed-git limit value has been raised on larger 112 platforms to save "git fetch" from a (recoverable) failure while 113 "gc" is running in parallel. 114 115 * Code to update the cache-tree has been tightened so that we won't 116 accidentally write out any 0{40} entry in the tree object. 117 118 * Attempt to allow us notice "fishy" situation where we fail to 119 remove the temporary directory used during the test. 120 121 * Travis CI gained a task to format the documentation with both 122 AsciiDoc and AsciiDoctor. 123 124 * Some platforms have ulong that is smaller than time_t, and our 125 historical use of ulong for timestamp would mean they cannot 126 represent some timestamp that the platform allows. Invent a 127 separate and dedicated timestamp_t (so that we can distingiuish 128 timestamps and a vanilla ulongs, which along is already a good 129 move), and then declare uintmax_t is the type to be used as the 130 timestamp_t. 131 132 * We can trigger Windows auto-build tester (credits: Dscho & 133 Microsoft) from our existing Travis CI tester now. 134 135 * Conversion from uchar[20] to struct object_id continues. 136 137 * Simplify parse_pathspec() codepath and stop it from looking at the 138 default in-core index. 139 140 * Add perf-test for wildmatch. 141 142 * Code from "conversion using external process" codepath has been 143 extracted to a separate sub-process.[ch] module. 144 145 * When "git checkout", "git merge", etc. manipulates the in-core 146 index, various pieces of information in the index extensions are 147 discarded from the original state, as it is usually not the case 148 that they are kept up-to-date and in-sync with the operation on the 149 main index. The untracked cache extension is copied across these 150 operations now, which would speed up "git status" (as long as the 151 cache is properly invalidated). 152 153 * The internal implementation of "git grep" has seen some clean-up. 154 155 * Update the C style recommendation for notes for translators, as 156 recent versions of gettext tools can work with our style of 157 multi-line comments. 158 159 * The implementation of "ref" API around the "packed refs" have been 160 cleaned up, in preparation for further changes. 161 162 * The internal logic used in "git blame" has been libified to make it 163 easier to use by cgit. 164 165 * Our code often opens a path to an optional file, to work on its 166 contents when we can successfully open it. We can ignore a failure 167 to open if such an optional file does not exist, but we do want to 168 report a failure in opening for other reasons (e.g. we got an I/O 169 error, or the file is there, but we lack the permission to open). 170 171 The exact errors we need to ignore are ENOENT (obviously) and 172 ENOTDIR (less obvious). Instead of repeating comparison of errno 173 with these two constants, introduce a helper function to do so. 174 175 * We often try to open a file for reading whose existence is 176 optional, and silently ignore errors from open/fopen; report such 177 errors if they are not due to missing files. 178 179 * When an existing repository is used for t/perf testing, we first 180 create bit-for-bit copy of it, which may grab a transient state of 181 the repository and freeze it into the repository used for testing, 182 which then may cause Git operations to fail. Single out "the index 183 being locked" case and forcibly drop the lock from the copy. 184 185 * Three instances of the same helper function have been consolidated 186 to one. 187 188 * "fast-import" uses a default pack chain depth that is consistent 189 with other parts of the system. 190 191 * A new test to show the interaction between the pattern [^a-z] 192 (which matches '/') and a slash in a path has been added. The 193 pattern should not match the slash with "pathmatch", but should 194 with "wildmatch". 195 196 * The 'diff-highlight' program (in contrib/) has been restructured 197 for easier reuse by an external project 'diff-so-fancy'. 198 (merge 0c977dbc81 jk/diff-highlight-module later to maint). 199 200 * A common pattern to free a piece of memory and assign NULL to the 201 pointer that used to point at it has been replaced with a new 202 FREE_AND_NULL() macro. 203 204 * Traditionally, the default die() routine had a code to prevent it 205 from getting called multiple times, which interacted badly when a 206 threaded program used it (one downside is that the real error may 207 be hidden and instead the only error message given to the user may 208 end up being "die recursion detected", which is not very useful). 209 210 * Introduce a "repository" object to eventually make it easier to 211 work in multiple repositories (the primary focus is to work with 212 the superproject and its submodules) in a single process. 213 214 * Optimize "what are the object names already taken in an alternate 215 object database?" query that is used to derive the length of prefix 216 an object name is uniquely abbreviated to. 217 218 219Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups. 220 221 222Fixes since v2.13 223----------------- 224 225Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.13 in the maintenance 226track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases' 227notes for details). 228 229 * "git gc" did not interact well with "git worktree"-managed 230 per-worktree refs. 231 232 * "git cherry-pick" and other uses of the sequencer machinery 233 mishandled a trailer block whose last line is an incomplete line. 234 This has been fixed so that an additional sign-off etc. are added 235 after completing the existing incomplete line. 236 237 * The codepath in "git am" that is used when running "git rebase" 238 leaked memory held for the log message of the commits being rebased. 239 240 * "git clone --config var=val" is a way to populate the 241 per-repository configuration file of the new repository, but it did 242 not work well when val is an empty string. This has been fixed. 243 244 * Setting "log.decorate=false" in the configuration file did not take 245 effect in v2.13, which has been corrected. 246 247 * A few codepaths in "checkout" and "am" working on an unborn branch 248 tried to access an uninitialized piece of memory. 249 250 * The Web interface to gmane news archive is long gone, even though 251 the articles are still accessible via NTTP. Replace the links with 252 ones to public-inbox.org. Because their message identification is 253 based on the actual message-id, it is likely that it will be easier 254 to migrate away from it if/when necessary. 255 256 * The receive-pack program now makes sure that the push certificate 257 records the same set of push options used for pushing. 258 259 * Tests have been updated to pass under GETTEXT_POISON (a mechanism 260 to ensure that output strings that should not be translated are 261 not translated by mistake), and TravisCI is told to run them. 262 263 * "git checkout --recurse-submodules" did not quite work with a 264 submodule that itself has submodules. 265 266 * "pack-objects" can stream a slice of an existing packfile out when 267 the pack bitmap can tell that the reachable objects are all needed 268 in the output, without inspecting individual objects. This 269 strategy however would not work well when "--local" and other 270 options are in use, and need to be disabled. 271 272 * Fix memory leaks pointed out by Coverity (and people). 273 274 * "git read-tree -m" (no tree-ish) gave a nonsense suggestion "use 275 --empty if you want to clear the index". With "-m", such a request 276 will still fail anyway, as you'd need to name at least one tree-ish 277 to be merged. 278 279 * Make sure our tests would pass when the sources are checked out 280 with "platform native" line ending convention by default on 281 Windows. Some "text" files out tests use and the test scripts 282 themselves that are meant to be run with /bin/sh, ought to be 283 checked out with eol=LF even on Windows. 284 285 * Introduce the BUG() macro to improve die("BUG: ..."). 286 287 * Clarify documentation for include.path and includeIf.<condition>.path 288 configuration variables. 289 290 * Git sometimes gives an advice in a rhetorical question that does 291 not require an answer, which can confuse new users and non native 292 speakers. Attempt to rephrase them. 293 294 * A few http:// links that are redirected to https:// in the 295 documentation have been updated to https:// links. 296 297 * "git for-each-ref --format=..." with %(HEAD) in the format used to 298 resolve the HEAD symref as many times as it had processed refs, 299 which was wasteful, and "git branch" shared the same problem. 300 301 * Regression fix to topic recently merged to 'master'. 302 303 * The shell completion script (in contrib/) learned "git stash" has 304 a new "push" subcommand. 305 306 * "git interpret-trailers", when used as GIT_EDITOR for "git commit 307 -v", looked for and appended to a trailer block at the very end, 308 i.e. at the end of the "diff" output. The command has been 309 corrected to pay attention to the cut-mark line "commit -v" adds to 310 the buffer---the real trailer block should appear just before it. 311 312 * A test allowed both "git push" and "git receive-pack" on the other 313 end write their traces into the same file. This is OK on platforms 314 that allows atomically appending to a file opened with O_APPEND, 315 but on other platforms led to a mangled output, causing 316 intermittent test failures. This has been fixed by disabling 317 traces from "receive-pack" in the test. 318 319 * Tag objects, which are not reachable from any ref, that point at 320 missing objects were mishandled by "git gc" and friends (they 321 should silently be ignored instead) 322 323 * "git describe --contains" penalized light-weight tags so much that 324 they were almost never considered. Instead, give them about the 325 same chance to be considered as an annotated tag that is the same 326 age as the underlying commit would. 327 328 * The "run-command" API implementation has been made more robust 329 against dead-locking in a threaded environment. 330 331 * A recent update to t5545-push-options.sh started skipping all the 332 tests in the script when a web server testing is disabled or 333 unavailable, not just the ones that require a web server. Non HTTP 334 tests have been salvaged to always run in this script. 335 336 * "git send-email" now uses Net::SMTP::SSL, which is obsolete, only 337 when needed. Recent versions of Net::SMTP can do TLS natively. 338 339 * "foo\bar\baz" in "git fetch foo\bar\baz", even though there is no 340 slashes in it, cannot be a nickname for a remote on Windows, as 341 that is likely to be a pathname on a local filesystem. 342 343 * "git clean -d" used to clean directories that has ignored files, 344 even though the command should not lose ignored ones without "-x". 345 "git status --ignored" did not list ignored and untracked files 346 without "-uall". These have been corrected. 347 348 * The result from "git diff" that compares two blobs, e.g. "git diff 349 $commit1:$path $commit2:$path", used to be shown with the full 350 object name as given on the command line, but it is more natural to 351 use the $path in the output and use it to look up .gitattributes. 352 353 * The "collision detecting" SHA-1 implementation shipped with 2.13 354 was quite broken on some big-endian platforms and/or platforms that 355 do not like unaligned fetches. Update to the upstream code which 356 has already fixed these issues. 357 358 * "git am -h" triggered a BUG(). 359 360 * The interaction of "url.*.insteadOf" and custom URL scheme's 361 whitelisting is now documented better. 362 363 * The timestamp of the index file is now taken after the file is 364 closed, to help Windows, on which a stale timestamp is reported by 365 fstat() on a file that is opened for writing and data was written 366 but not yet closed. 367 368 * "git pull --rebase --autostash" didn't auto-stash when the local history 369 fast-forwards to the upstream. 370 371 * A flaky test has been corrected. 372 373 * "git $cmd -h" for builtin commands calls the implementation of the 374 command (i.e. cmd_$cmd() function) without doing any repository 375 set-up, and the commands that expect RUN_SETUP is done by the Git 376 potty needs to be prepared to show the help text without barfing. 377 (merge d691551192 jk/consistent-h later to maint). 378 379 * Help contributors that visit us at GitHub. 380 381 * "git stash push <pathspec>" did not work from a subdirectory at all. 382 Bugfix for a topic in v2.13 383 384 * As there is no portable way to pass timezone information to 385 strftime, some output format from "git log" and friends are 386 impossible to produce. Teach our own strbuf_addftime to replace %z 387 and %Z with caller-supplied values to help working around this. 388 (merge 6eced3ec5e rs/strbuf-addftime-zZ later to maint). 389 390 * "git mergetool" learned to work around a wrapper MacOS X adds 391 around underlying meld. 392 (merge 0af85f84bd da/mergetools-meld-output-opt-on-macos later to maint). 393 394 * An example in documentation that does not work in multi worktree 395 configuration has been corrected. 396 (merge 773a88914f ah/doc-gitattributes-empty-index later to maint). 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 (merge fe9e2aefd4 rs/pretty-add-again later to maint). 403 404 * The code to pick up and execute command alias definition from the 405 configuration used to switch to the top of the working tree and 406 then come back when the expanded alias was executed, which was 407 unnecessarilyl complex. Attempt to simplify the logic by using the 408 early-config mechanism that does not chdir around. 409 (merge a9bcf6586d js/alias-early-config later to maint). 410 411 * Fix configuration codepath to pay proper attention to commondir 412 that is used in multi-worktree situation, and isolate config API 413 into its own header file. 414 (merge dc8441fdb4 bw/config-h later to maint). 415 416 * "git add -p" were updated in 2.12 timeframe to cope with custom 417 core.commentchar but the implementation was buggy and a 418 metacharacter like $ and * did not work. 419 (merge d85d7ecb80 jk/add-p-commentchar-fix later to maint). 420 421 * A recent regression in "git rebase -i" has been fixed and tests 422 that would have caught it and others have been added. 423 (merge adf16c08cb pw/rebase-i-regression-fix-tests later to maint). 424 425 * An unaligned 32-bit access in pack-bitmap code ahs been corrected. 426 (merge da41c942b3 jc/pack-bitmap-unaligned later to maint). 427 428 * Tighten error checks for invalid "git apply" input. 429 (merge d70e9c5c8c rs/apply-validate-input later to maint). 430 431 * The split index code did not honor core.sharedrepository setting 432 correctly. 433 (merge 3ee83f48e5 cc/shared-index-permfix later to maint). 434 435 * The Makefile rule in contrib/subtree for building documentation 436 learned to honour USE_ASCIIDOCTOR just like the main documentation 437 set does. 438 (merge fdc1ad97c1 aw/contrib-subtree-doc-asciidoctor later to maint). 439 440 * Update the sha1dc again to fix portability glitches. 441 (merge 9936c1b52a ab/sha1dc-maint later to maint). 442 443 * Code clean-up to fix possible buffer over-reading. 444 (merge 8bc172e5f2 rs/apply-avoid-over-reading later to maint). 445 446 * A few tests that tried to verify the contents of push certificates 447 did not use 'git rev-parse' to formulate the line to look for in 448 the certificate correctly. 449 (merge 8722947e5c js/t5534-rev-parse-gives-multi-line-output-fix later to maint). 450 451 * Other minor doc, test and build updates and code cleanups. 452 (merge 68241cb9dd sb/t4005-modernize later to maint). 453 (merge 4fced24712 ks/t7508-indent-fix later to maint). 454 (merge 968b1fe263 mb/reword-autocomplete-message later to maint). 455 (merge 8592c95cdf ah/doc-pretty-color-auto-prefix later to maint). 456 (merge 73fc2aadc7 js/fsck-name-object later to maint). 457 (merge dc4b4a61ba jc/utf8-fprintf later to maint). 458 (merge c2d4b4cd06 sb/merge-recursive-code-cleanup later to maint).