Documentation / RelNotes / 2.13.0.txton commit Merge branch 'bw/submodule-with-bs-path' (5bceab4)
   1Git 2.13 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 * The historical argument order "git merge <msg> HEAD <commit>..."
  15   has been deprecated for quite some time, and is now removed.
  16
  17 * The default location "~/.git-credential-cache/socket" for the
  18   socket used to communicate with the credential-cache daemon has
  19   been moved to "~/.cache/git/credential/socket".
  20
  21 * Git now avoids blindly falling back to ".git" when the setup
  22   sequence said we are _not_ in Git repository.  A corner case that
  23   happens to work right now may be broken by a call to die("BUG").
  24   We've tried hard to locate such cases and fixed them, but there
  25   might still be cases that need to be addressed--bug reports are
  26   greatly appreciated.
  27
  28
  29Updates since v2.12
  30-------------------
  31
  32UI, Workflows & Features
  33
  34 * "git describe" and "git name-rev" have been taught to take more
  35   than one refname patterns to restrict the set of refs to base their
  36   naming output on, and also learned to take negative patterns to
  37   name refs not to be used for naming via their "--exclude" option.
  38
  39 * Deletion of a branch "foo/bar" could remove .git/refs/heads/foo
  40   once there no longer is any other branch whose name begins with
  41   "foo/", but we didn't do so so far.  Now we do.
  42
  43 * When "git merge" detects a path that is renamed in one history
  44   while the other history deleted (or modified) it, it now reports
  45   both paths to help the user understand what is going on in the two
  46   histories being merged.
  47
  48 * The <url> part in "http.<url>.<variable>" configuration variable
  49   can now be spelled with '*' that serves as wildcard.
  50   E.g. "http.https://*.example.com.proxy" can be used to specify the
  51   proxy used for https://a.example.com, https://b.example.com, etc.,
  52   i.e. any host in the example.com domain.
  53
  54 * "git tag" did not leave useful message when adding a new entry to
  55   reflog; this was left unnoticed for a long time because refs/tags/*
  56   doesn't keep reflog by default.
  57
  58 * The "negative" pathspec feature was somewhat more cumbersome to use
  59   than necessary in that its short-hand used "!" which needed to be
  60   escaped from shells, and it required "exclude from what?" specified.
  61
  62 * The command line options for ssh invocation needs to be tweaked for
  63   some implementations of SSH (e.g. PuTTY plink wants "-P <port>"
  64   while OpenSSH wants "-p <port>" to specify port to connect to), and
  65   the variant was guessed when GIT_SSH environment variable is used
  66   to specify it.  The logic to guess now applies to the command
  67   specified by the newer GIT_SSH_COMMAND and also core.sshcommand
  68   configuration variable, and comes with an escape hatch for users to
  69   deal with misdetected cases.
  70
  71 * The "--git-path", "--git-common-dir", and "--shared-index-path"
  72   options of "git rev-parse" did not produce usable output.  They are
  73   now updated to show the path to the correct file, relative to where
  74   the caller is.
  75
  76 * "git diff -W" has been taught to handle the case where a new
  77   function is added at the end of the file better.
  78
  79 * "git update-ref -d" and other operations to delete references did
  80   not leave any entry in HEAD's reflog when the reference being
  81   deleted was the current branch.  This is not a problem in practice
  82   because you do not want to delete the branch you are currently on,
  83   but caused renaming of the current branch to something else not to
  84   be logged in a useful way.
  85
  86 * "Cc:" on the trailer part does not have to conform to RFC strictly,
  87   unlike in the e-mail header.  "git send-email" has been updated to
  88   ignore anything after '>' when picking addresses, to allow non-address
  89   cruft like " # stable 4.4" after the address.
  90
  91 * When "git submodule init" decides that the submodule in the working
  92   tree is its upstream, it now gives a warning as it is not a very
  93   common setup.
  94
  95 * "git stash push" takes a pathspec so that the local changes can be
  96   stashed away only partially.
  97
  98 * Documentation for "git ls-files" did not refer to core.quotePath.
  99
 100 * The experimental "split index" feature has gained a few
 101   configuration variables to make it easier to use.
 102
 103 * From a working tree of a repository, a new option of "rev-parse"
 104   lets you ask if the repository is used as a submodule of another
 105   project, and where the root level of the working tree of that
 106   project (i.e. your superproject) is.
 107
 108 * The pathspec mechanism learned to further limit the paths that
 109   match the pattern to those that have specified attributes attached
 110   via the gitattributes mechanism.
 111
 112 * Our source code has used the SHA1_HEADER cpp macro after "#include"
 113   in the C code to switch among the SHA-1 implementations. Instead,
 114   list the exact header file names and switch among implementations
 115   using "#ifdef BLK_SHA1/#include "block-sha1/sha1.h"/.../#endif";
 116   this helps some IDE tools.
 117
 118 * The start-up sequence of "git" needs to figure out some configured
 119   settings before it finds and set itself up in the location of the
 120   repository and was quite messy due to its "chicken-and-egg" nature.
 121   The code has been restructured.
 122
 123 * The command line prompt (in contrib/) learned a new 'tag' style
 124   that can be specified with GIT_PS1_DESCRIBE_STYLE, to describe a
 125   detached HEAD with "git describe --tags".
 126
 127 * The configuration file learned a new "includeIf.<condition>.path"
 128   that includes the contents of the given path only when the
 129   condition holds.  This allows you to say "include this work-related
 130   bit only in the repositories under my ~/work/ directory".
 131
 132 * Recent update to "rebase -i" started showing a message that is not
 133   a warning with "warning:" prefix by mistake.  This has been fixed.
 134
 135 * Recently we started passing the "--push-options" through the
 136   external remote helper interface; now the "smart HTTP" remote
 137   helper understands what to do with the passed information.
 138
 139 * "git describe --dirty" dies when it cannot be determined if the
 140   state in the working tree matches that of HEAD (e.g. broken
 141   repository or broken submodule).  The command learned a new option
 142   "git describe --broken" to give "$name-broken" (where $name is the
 143   description of HEAD) in such a case.
 144
 145 * "git checkout" is taught the "--recurse-submodules" option.
 146
 147 * Recent enhancement to "git stash push" command to support pathspec
 148   to allow only a subset of working tree changes to be stashed away
 149   was found to be too chatty and exposed the internal implementation
 150   detail (e.g. when it uses reset to match the index to HEAD before
 151   doing other things, output from reset seeped out).  These, and
 152   other chattyness has been fixed.
 153
 154 * "git merge <message> HEAD <commit>" syntax that has been deprecated
 155   since October 2007 has been removed.
 156
 157 * The refs completion for large number of refs has been sped up,
 158   partly by giving up disambiguating ambiguous refs and partly by
 159   eliminating most of the shell processing between 'git for-each-ref'
 160   and 'ls-remote' and Bash's completion facility.
 161
 162 * On many keyboards, typing "@{" involves holding down SHIFT key and
 163   one can easily end up with "@{Up..." when typing "@{upstream}".  As
 164   the upstream/push keywords do not appear anywhere else in the syntax,
 165   we can safely accept them case insensitively without introducing
 166   ambiguity or confusion to solve this.
 167
 168 * "git tag/branch/for-each-ref" family of commands long allowed to
 169   filter the refs by "--contains X" (show only the refs that are
 170   descendants of X), "--merged X" (show only the refs that are
 171   ancestors of X), "--no-merged X" (show only the refs that are not
 172   ancestors of X).  One curious omission, "--no-contains X" (show
 173   only the refs that are not descendants of X) has been added to
 174   them.
 175
 176 * The default behaviour of "git log" in an interactive session has
 177   been changed to enable "--decorate".
 178
 179 * The output from "git status --short" has been extended to show
 180   various kinds of dirtyness in submodules differently; instead of to
 181   "M" for modified, 'm' and '?' can be shown to signal changes only
 182   to the working tree of the submodule but not the commit that is
 183   checked out.
 184
 185
 186Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.
 187
 188 * The code to list branches in "git branch" has been consolidated
 189   with the more generic ref-filter API.
 190
 191 * Resource usage while enumerating refs from alternate object store
 192   has been optimized to help receiving end of "push" that hosts a
 193   repository with many "forks".
 194
 195 * The gitattributes machinery is being taught to work better in a
 196   multi-threaded environment.
 197
 198 * "git rebase -i" starts using the recently updated "sequencer" code.
 199
 200 * Code and design clean-up for the refs API.
 201
 202 * The preload-index code has been taught not to bother with the index
 203   entries that are paths that are not checked out by "sparse checkout".
 204
 205 * Some warning() messages from "git clean" were updated to show the
 206   errno from failed system calls.
 207
 208 * The "parse_config_key()" API function has been cleaned up.
 209
 210 * A test that creates a confusing branch whose name is HEAD has been
 211   corrected not to do so.
 212
 213 * The code that parses header fields in the commit object has been
 214   updated for (micro)performance and code hygiene.
 215
 216 * An helper function to make it easier to append the result from
 217   real_path() to a strbuf has been added.
 218
 219 * Reduce authentication round-trip over HTTP when the server supports
 220   just a single authentication method.  This also improves the
 221   behaviour when Git is misconfigured to enable http.emptyAuth
 222   against a server that does not authenticate without a username
 223   (i.e. not using Kerberos etc., which makes http.emptyAuth
 224   pointless).
 225
 226 * Windows port wants to use OpenSSL's implementation of SHA-1
 227   routines, so let them.
 228
 229 * The t/perf performance test suite was not prepared to test not so
 230   old versions of Git, but now it covers versions of Git that are not
 231   so ancient.
 232
 233 * Add 32-bit Linux variant to the set of platforms to be tested with
 234   Travis CI.
 235
 236 * "git branch --list" takes the "--abbrev" and "--no-abbrev" options
 237   to control the output of the object name in its "-v"(erbose)
 238   output, but a recent update started ignoring them; fix it before
 239   the breakage reaches to any released version.
 240
 241 * Picking two versions of Git and running tests to make sure the
 242   older one and the newer one interoperate happily has now become
 243   possible.
 244
 245 * "uchar [40]" to "struct object_id" conversion continues.
 246
 247 * "git tag --contains" used to (ab)use the object bits to keep track
 248   of the state of object reachability without clearing them after
 249   use; this has been cleaned up and made to use the newer commit-slab
 250   facility.
 251
 252 * The "debug" helper used in the test framework learned to run
 253   a command under "gdb" interactively.
 254
 255 * The "detect attempt to create collisions" variant of SHA-1
 256   implementation by Marc Stevens (CWI) and Dan Shumow (Microsoft)
 257   has been integrated and made the default.
 258
 259 * The test framework learned to detect unterminated here documents.
 260
 261 * The name-hash used for detecting paths that are different only in
 262   cases (which matter on case insensitive filesystems) has been
 263   optimized to take advantage of multi-threading when it makes sense.
 264
 265 * An earlier version of sha1dc/sha1.c that was merged to 'master'
 266   compiled incorrectly on Windows, which has been fixed.
 267
 268 * "what URL do we want to update this submodule?" and "are we
 269   interested in this submodule?" are split into two distinct
 270   concepts, and then the way used to express the latter got extended,
 271   paving a way to make it easier to manage a project with many
 272   submodules and make it possible to later extend use of multiple
 273   worktrees for a project with submodules.
 274
 275 * Some debugging output from "git describe" were marked for l10n,
 276   but some weren't.  Mark missing ones for l10n.
 277
 278 * Define a new task in .travis.yml that triggers a test session on
 279   Windows run elsewhere.
 280
 281 * Conversion from unsigned char [40] to struct object_id continues.
 282
 283 * The "submodule" specific field in the ref_store structure is
 284   replaced with a more generic "gitdir" that can later be used also
 285   when dealing with ref_store that represents the set of refs visible
 286   from the other worktrees.
 287
 288Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
 289
 290
 291Fixes since v2.12
 292-----------------
 293
 294Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.12 in the maintenance
 295track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases'
 296notes for details).
 297
 298 * "git repack --depth=<n>" for a long time busted the specified depth
 299   when reusing delta from existing packs.  This has been corrected.
 300
 301 * The code to parse the command line "git grep <patterns>... <rev>
 302   [[--] <pathspec>...]" has been cleaned up, and a handful of bugs
 303   have been fixed (e.g. we used to check "--" if it is a rev).
 304
 305 * "git ls-remote" and "git archive --remote" are designed to work
 306   without being in a directory under Git's control.  However, recent
 307   updates revealed that we randomly look into a directory called
 308   .git/ without actually doing necessary set-up when working in a
 309   repository.  Stop doing so.
 310
 311 * "git show-branch" expected there were only very short branch names
 312   in the repository and used a fixed-length buffer to hold them
 313   without checking for overflow.
 314
 315 * A caller of tempfile API that uses stdio interface to write to
 316   files may ignore errors while writing, which is detected when
 317   tempfile is closed (with a call to ferror()).  By that time, the
 318   original errno that may have told us what went wrong is likely to
 319   be long gone and was overwritten by an irrelevant value.
 320   close_tempfile() now resets errno to EIO to make errno at least
 321   predictable.
 322
 323 * "git remote rm X", when a branch has remote X configured as the
 324   value of its branch.*.remote, tried to remove branch.*.remote and
 325   branch.*.merge and failed if either is unset.
 326
 327 * A "gc.log" file left by a backgrounded "gc --auto" disables further
 328   automatic gc; it has been taught to run at least once a day (by
 329   default) by ignoring a stale "gc.log" file that is too old.
 330
 331 * The code to parse "git -c VAR=VAL cmd" and set configuration
 332   variable for the duration of cmd had two small bugs, which have
 333   been fixed.
 334
 335 * user.email that consists of only cruft chars should consistently
 336   error out, but didn't.
 337
 338 * "git upload-pack", which is a counter-part of "git fetch", did not
 339   report a request for a ref that was not advertised as invalid.
 340   This is generally not a problem (because "git fetch" will stop
 341   before making such a request), but is the right thing to do.
 342
 343 * A leak in a codepath to read from a packed object in (rare) cases
 344   has been plugged.
 345
 346 * When a redirected http transport gets an error during the
 347   redirected request, we ignored the error we got from the server,
 348   and ended up giving a not-so-useful error message.
 349
 350 * The patch subcommand of "git add -i" was meant to have paths
 351   selection prompt just like other subcommand, unlike "git add -p"
 352   directly jumps to hunk selection.  Recently, this was broken and
 353   "add -i" lost the paths selection dialog, but it now has been
 354   fixed.
 355
 356 * Git v2.12 was shipped with an embarrassing breakage where various
 357   operations that verify paths given from the user stopped dying when
 358   seeing an issue, and instead later triggering segfault.
 359
 360 * There is no need for Python only to give a few messages to the
 361   standard error stream, but we somehow did.
 362
 363 * The code to parse "git log -L..." command line was buggy when there
 364   are many ranges specified with -L; overrun of the allocated buffer
 365   has been fixed.
 366
 367 * The command-line parsing of "git log -L" copied internal data
 368   structures using incorrect size on ILP32 systems.
 369
 370 * "git diff --quiet" relies on the size field in diff_filespec to be
 371   correctly populated, but diff_populate_filespec() helper function
 372   made an incorrect short-cut when asked only to populate the size
 373   field for paths that need to go through convert_to_git() (e.g. CRLF
 374   conversion).
 375
 376 * A few tests were run conditionally under (rare) conditions where
 377   they cannot be run (like running cvs tests under 'root' account).
 378
 379 * "git branch @" created refs/heads/@ as a branch, and in general the
 380   code that handled @{-1} and @{upstream} was a bit too loose in
 381   disambiguating.
 382
 383 * "git fetch" that requests a commit by object name, when the other
 384   side does not allow such an request, failed without much
 385   explanation.
 386
 387 * "git filter-branch --prune-empty" drops a single-parent commit that
 388   becomes a no-op, but did not drop a root commit whose tree is empty.
 389
 390 * Recent versions of Git treats http alternates (used in dumb http
 391   transport) just like HTTP redirects and requires the client to
 392   enable following it, due to security concerns.  But we forgot to
 393   give a warning when we decide not to honor the alternates.
 394
 395 * "git push" had a handful of codepaths that could lead to a deadlock
 396   when unexpected error happened, which has been fixed.
 397
 398 * "Dumb http" transport used to misparse a nonsense http-alternates
 399   response, which has been fixed.
 400
 401 * "git add -p <pathspec>" unnecessarily expanded the pathspec to a
 402   list of individual files that matches the pathspec by running "git
 403   ls-files <pathspec>", before feeding it to "git diff-index" to see
 404   which paths have changes, because historically the pathspec
 405   language supported by "diff-index" was weaker.  These days they are
 406   equivalent and there is no reason to internally expand it.  This
 407   helps both performance and avoids command line argument limit on
 408   some platforms.
 409   (merge 7288e12cce jk/add-i-use-pathspecs later to maint).
 410
 411 * "git status --porcelain" is supposed to give a stable output, but a
 412   few strings were left as translatable by mistake.
 413
 414 * "git revert -m 0 $merge_commit" complained that reverting a merge
 415   needs to say relative to which parent the reversion needs to
 416   happen, as if "-m 0" weren't given.  The correct diagnosis is that
 417   "-m 0" does not refer to the first parent ("-m 1" does).  This has
 418   been fixed.
 419
 420 * Code to read submodule.<name>.ignore config did not state the
 421   variable name correctly when giving an error message diagnosing
 422   misconfiguration.
 423
 424 * Fix for NO_PTHREADS build.
 425
 426 * Fix for potential segv introduced in v2.11.0 and later (also
 427   v2.10.2) to "git log --pickaxe-regex -S".
 428
 429 * A few unterminated here documents in tests were fixed, which in
 430   turn revealed incorrect expectations the tests make. These tests
 431   have been updated.
 432
 433 * Fix for NO_PTHREADS option.
 434   (merge 2225e1ea20 bw/grep-recurse-submodules later to maint).
 435
 436 * Git now avoids blindly falling back to ".git" when the setup
 437   sequence said we are _not_ in Git repository.  A corner case that
 438   happens to work right now may be broken by a call to die("BUG").
 439   (merge b1ef400eec jk/no-looking-at-dotgit-outside-repo-final later to maint).
 440
 441 * A few commands that recently learned the "--recurse-submodule"
 442   option misbehaved when started from a subdirectory of the
 443   superproject.
 444   (merge b2dfeb7c00 bw/recurse-submodules-relative-fix later to maint).
 445
 446 * FreeBSD implementation of getcwd(3) behaved differently when an
 447   intermediate directory is unreadable/unsearchable depending on the
 448   length of the buffer provided, which our strbuf_getcwd() was not
 449   aware of.  strbuf_getcwd() has been taught to cope with it better.
 450   (merge a54e938e5b rs/freebsd-getcwd-workaround later to maint).
 451
 452 * A recent update to "rebase -i" stopped running hooks for the "git
 453   commit" command during "reword" action, which has been fixed.
 454
 455 * Removing an entry from a notes tree and then looking another note
 456   entry from the resulting tree using the internal notes API
 457   functions did not work as expected.  No in-tree users of the API
 458   has such access pattern, but it still is worth fixing.
 459
 460 * "git receive-pack" could have been forced to die by attempting
 461   allocate an unreasonably large amount of memory with a crafted push
 462   certificate; this has been fixed.
 463   (merge f2214dede9 bc/push-cert-receive-fix later to maint).
 464
 465 * Update error handling for codepath that deals with corrupt loose
 466   objects.
 467   (merge 51054177b3 jk/loose-object-info-report-error later to maint).
 468
 469 * "git diff --submodule=diff" learned to work better in a project
 470   with a submodule that in turn has its own submodules.
 471   (merge 17b254cda6 sb/show-diff-for-submodule-in-diff-fix later to maint).
 472
 473 * Update the build dependency so that an update to /usr/bin/perl
 474   etc. result in recomputation of perl.mak file.
 475   (merge c59c4939c2 ab/regen-perl-mak-with-different-perl later to maint).
 476
 477 * "git push --recurse-submodules --push-option=<string>" learned to
 478   propagate the push option recursively down to pushes in submodules.
 479
 480 * If a patch e-mail had its first paragraph after an in-body header
 481   indented (even after a blank line after the in-body header line),
 482   the indented line was mistook as a continuation of the in-body
 483   header.  This has been fixed.
 484   (merge fd1062e52e lt/mailinfo-in-body-header-continuation later to maint).
 485
 486 * Clean up fallouts from recent tightening of the set-up sequence,
 487   where Git barfs when repository information is accessed without
 488   first ensuring that it was started in a repository.
 489   (merge bccb22cbb1 jk/no-looking-at-dotgit-outside-repo later to maint).
 490
 491 * "git p4" used "name-rev HEAD" when it wants to learn what branch is
 492   checked out; it should use "symbolic-ref HEAD".
 493   (merge eff451101d ld/p4-current-branch-fix later to maint).
 494
 495 * Other minor doc, test and build updates and code cleanups.
 496   (merge df2a6e38b7 jk/pager-in-use later to maint).
 497   (merge 75ec4a6cb0 ab/branch-list-doc later to maint).
 498   (merge 3e5b36c637 sg/skip-prefix-in-prettify-refname later to maint).
 499   (merge 2c5e2865cc jk/fast-import-cleanup later to maint).
 500   (merge 4473060bc2 ab/test-readme-updates later to maint).
 501   (merge 48a96972fd ab/doc-submitting later to maint).
 502   (merge f5c2bc2b96 jk/make-coccicheck-detect-errors later to maint).
 503   (merge c105f563d1 cc/untracked later to maint).
 504   (merge 8668976b53 jc/unused-symbols later to maint).
 505   (merge fba275dc93 jc/bs-t-is-not-a-tab-for-sed later to maint).
 506   (merge be6ed145de mm/ls-files-s-doc later to maint).
 507   (merge 60b091c679 qp/bisect-docfix later to maint).
 508   (merge 47242cd103 ah/diff-files-ours-theirs-doc later to maint).
 509   (merge 35ad44cbd8 sb/submodule-rm-absorb later to maint).
 510   (merge 0301f1fd92 va/i18n-perl-scripts later to maint).
 511   (merge 733e064d98 vn/revision-shorthand-for-side-branch-log later to maint).