1Git 2.9 Release Notes 2===================== 3 4Backward compatibility notes 5---------------------------- 6 7The end-user facing Porcelain level commands in the "git diff" and 8"git log" family by default enable the rename detection; you can still 9use "diff.renames" configuration variable to disable this. 10 11Merging two branches that have no common ancestor with "git merge" is 12by default forbidden now to prevent creating such an unusual merge by 13mistake. 14 15The output formats of "git log" that indents the commit log message by 164 spaces now expands HT in the log message by default. You can use 17the "--no-expand-tabs" option to disable this. 18 19"git commit-tree" plumbing command required the user to always sign 20its result when the user sets the commit.gpgsign configuration 21variable, which was an ancient mistake, which this release corrects. 22A script that drives commit-tree, if it relies on this mistake, now 23needs to read commit.gpgsign and pass the -S option as necessary. 24 25 26Updates since v2.8 27------------------ 28 29UI, Workflows & Features 30 31 * Comes with git-multimail 1.3.1 (in contrib/). 32 33 * The end-user facing commands like "git diff" and "git log" 34 now enable the rename detection by default. 35 36 * The credential.helper configuration variable is cumulative and 37 there is no good way to override it from the command line. As 38 a special case, giving an empty string as its value now serves 39 as the signal to clear the values specified in various files. 40 41 * A new "interactive.diffFilter" configuration can be used to 42 customize the diff shown in "git add -i" sessions. 43 44 * "git p4" now allows P4 author names to be mapped to Git author 45 names. 46 47 * "git rebase -x" can be used without passing "-i" option. 48 49 * "git -c credential.<var>=<value> submodule" can now be used to 50 propagate configuration variables related to credential helper 51 down to the submodules. 52 53 * "git tag" can create an annotated tag without explicitly given an 54 "-a" (or "-s") option (i.e. when a tag message is given). A new 55 configuration variable, tag.forceSignAnnotated, can be used to tell 56 the command to create signed tag in such a situation. 57 58 * "git merge" used to allow merging two branches that have no common 59 base by default, which led to a brand new history of an existing 60 project created and then get pulled by an unsuspecting maintainer, 61 which allowed an unnecessary parallel history merged into the 62 existing project. The command has been taught not to allow this by 63 default, with an escape hatch "--allow-unrelated-histories" option 64 to be used in a rare event that merges histories of two projects 65 that started their lives independently. 66 67 * "git pull" has been taught to pass the "--allow-unrelated-histories" 68 option to underlying "git merge". 69 70 * "git apply -v" learned to report paths in the patch that were 71 skipped via --include/--exclude mechanism or being outside the 72 current working directory. 73 74 * Shell completion (in contrib/) updates. 75 76 * The commit object name reported when "rebase -i" stops has been 77 shortened. 78 79 * "git worktree add" can be given "--no-checkout" option to only 80 create an empty worktree without checking out the files. 81 82 * "git mergetools" learned to drive ExamDiff. 83 84 * "git pull --rebase" learned "--[no-]autostash" option, so that 85 the rebase.autostash configuration variable set to true can be 86 overridden from the command line. 87 88 * When "git log" shows the log message indented by 4-spaces, the 89 remainder of a line after a HT does not align in the way the author 90 originally intended. The command now expands tabs by default to help 91 such a case, and allows the users to override it with a new option, 92 "--no-expand-tabs". 93 94 * "git send-email" now uses a more readable timestamps when 95 formulating a message ID. 96 97 * "git rerere" can encounter two or more files with the same conflict 98 signature that have to be resolved in different ways, but there was 99 no way to record these separate resolutions. 100 101 * "git p4" learned to record P4 jobs in Git commit that imports from 102 the history in Perforce. 103 104 * "git describe --contains" often made a hard-to-justify choice of 105 tag to name a given commit, because it tried to come up 106 with a name with smallest number of hops from a tag, causing an old 107 commit whose close descendant that is recently tagged were not 108 described with respect to an old tag but with a newer tag. It did 109 not help that its computation of "hop" count was further tweaked to 110 penalize being on a side branch of a merge. The logic has been 111 updated to favor using the tag with the oldest tagger date, which 112 is a lot easier to explain to the end users: "We describe a commit 113 in terms of the (chronologically) oldest tag that contains the 114 commit." 115 116 * "git clone" learned the "--shallow-submodules" option. 117 118 * HTTP transport clients learned to throw extra HTTP headers at the 119 server, specified via http.extraHeader configuration variable. 120 121 * Patch output from "git diff" and friends has been tweaked to be 122 more readable by using a blank line as a strong hint that the 123 contents before and after it belong to logically separate units. 124 125 * A new configuration variable core.hooksPath allows customizing 126 where the hook directory is. 127 128 * An earlier addition of "sanitize_submodule_env" with 14111fc4 (git: 129 submodule honor -c credential.* from command line, 2016-02-29) 130 turned out to be a convoluted no-op; implement what it wanted to do 131 correctly, and stop filtering settings given via "git -c var=val". 132 133 * "git commit --dry-run" reported "No, no, you cannot commit." in one 134 case where "git commit" would have allowed you to commit, and this 135 improves it a little bit ("git commit --dry-run --short" still does 136 not give you the correct answer, for example). This is a stop-gap 137 measure in that "commit --short --dry-run" still gives an incorrect 138 result. 139 140 * The experimental "multiple worktree" feature gains more safety to 141 forbid operations on a branch that is checked out or being actively 142 worked on elsewhere, by noticing that e.g. it is being rebased. 143 144 * "git format-patch" learned a new "--base" option to record what 145 (public, well-known) commit the original series was built on in 146 its output. 147 148 * "git commit" learned to pay attention to the "commit.verbose" 149 configuration variable and act as if the "--verbose" option 150 was given from the command line. 151 152 * Updated documentation gives hints to GMail users with two-factor 153 auth enabled that they need app-specific-password when using 154 "git send-email". 155 156 * The manpage output of our documentation did not render well in 157 terminal; typeset literals in bold by default to make them stand 158 out more. 159 160 * The mark-up in the top-level README.md file has been updated to 161 typeset CLI command names differently from the body text. 162 163 164Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc. 165 166 * The embedded args argv-array in the child process is used to build 167 the command line to run pack-objects instead of using a separate 168 array of strings. 169 170 * A test for tags has been restructured so that more parts of it can 171 easily be run on a platform without a working GnuPG. 172 173 * The startup_info data, which records if we are working inside a 174 repository (among other things), are now uniformly available to Git 175 subcommand implementations, and Git avoids attempting to touch 176 references when we are not in a repository. 177 178 * The command line argument parser for "receive-pack" has been 179 rewritten to use parse-options. 180 181 * A major part of "git submodule update" has been ported to C to take 182 advantage of the recently added framework to run download tasks in 183 parallel. Other updates to "git submodule" that move pieces of 184 logic to C continues. 185 186 * Rename bunch of tests on "git clone" for better organization. 187 188 * The tests that involve running httpd leaked the system-wide 189 configuration in /etc/gitconfig to the tested environment. 190 191 * Build updates for MSVC. 192 193 * The repository set-up sequence has been streamlined (the biggest 194 change is that there is no longer git_config_early()), so that we 195 do not attempt to look into refs/* when we know we do not have a 196 Git repository. 197 198 * Code restructuring around the "refs" API to prepare for pluggable 199 refs backends. 200 201 * Sources to many test helper binaries and the generated helpers 202 have been moved to t/helper/ subdirectory to reduce clutter at the 203 top level of the tree. 204 205 * Unify internal logic between "git tag -v" and "git verify-tag" 206 commands by making one directly call into the other. 207 208 * "merge-recursive" strategy incorrectly checked if a path that is 209 involved in its internal merge exists in the working tree. 210 211 * The test scripts for "git p4" (but not "git p4" implementation 212 itself) has been updated so that they would work even on a system 213 where the installed version of Python is python 3. 214 215 * As nobody maintains our in-tree git.spec.in and distros use their 216 own spec file, we stopped pretending that we support "make rpm". 217 218 * Move from "unsigned char[20]" to "struct object_id" continues. 219 220 * The code for warning_errno/die_errno has been refactored and a new 221 error_errno() reporting helper is introduced. 222 (merge 1da045f nd/error-errno later to maint). 223 224 * Running tests with '-x' option to trace the individual command 225 executions is a useful way to debug test scripts, but some tests 226 that capture the standard error stream and check what the command 227 said can be broken with the trace output mixed in. When running 228 our tests under "bash", however, we can redirect the trace output 229 to another file descriptor to keep the standard error of programs 230 being tested intact. 231 232 * t0040 had too many unnecessary repetitions in its test data. Teach 233 test-parse-options program so that a caller can tell what it 234 expects in its output, so that these repetitions can be cleaned up. 235 236 * Add perf test for "rebase -i". 237 238 * Common mistakes when writing gitlink: in our documentation are 239 found by "make check-docs". 240 241 * t9xxx series has been updated primarily for readability, while 242 fixing small bugs in it. A few scripted Porcelain commands have 243 also been updated to fix possible bugs around their use of 244 "test -z" and "test -n". 245 246 * CI test was taught to run git-svn tests. 247 248 * "git cat-file --batch-all" has been sped up, by taking advantage 249 of the fact that it does not have to read a list of objects, in two 250 ways. 251 252 * test updates to make it more readable and maintainable. 253 (merge e6273f4 es/t1500-modernize later to maint). 254 255 * "make DEVELOPER=1" worked as expected; setting DEVELOPER=1 in 256 config.mak didn't. 257 (merge 51dd3e8 mm/makefile-developer-can-be-in-config-mak later to maint). 258 259 * The way how "submodule--helper list" signals unmatch error to its 260 callers has been updated. 261 262 * A bash-ism "local" has been removed from "git submodule" scripted 263 Porcelain. 264 265 266Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups. 267 268 269Fixes since v2.8 270---------------- 271 272Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.8 in the maintenance 273track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases' 274notes for details). 275 276 * "git config --get-urlmatch", unlike other variants of the "git 277 config --get" family, did not signal error with its exit status 278 when there was no matching configuration. 279 280 * The "--local-env-vars" and "--resolve-git-dir" options of "git 281 rev-parse" failed to work outside a repository when the command's 282 option parsing was rewritten in 1.8.5 era. 283 284 * "git index-pack --keep[=<msg>] pack-$name.pack" simply did not work. 285 286 * Fetching of history by naming a commit object name directly didn't 287 work across remote-curl transport. 288 289 * A small memory leak in an error codepath has been plugged in xdiff 290 code. 291 292 * strbuf_getwholeline() did not NUL-terminate the buffer on certain 293 corner cases in its error codepath. 294 295 * "git mergetool" did not work well with conflicts that both sides 296 deleted. 297 298 * "git send-email" had trouble parsing alias file in mailrc format 299 when lines in it had trailing whitespaces on them. 300 301 * When "git merge --squash" stopped due to conflict, the concluding 302 "git commit" failed to read in the SQUASH_MSG that shows the log 303 messages from all the squashed commits. 304 305 * "git merge FETCH_HEAD" dereferenced NULL pointer when merging 306 nothing into an unborn history (which is arguably unusual usage, 307 which perhaps was the reason why nobody noticed it). 308 309 * When "git worktree" feature is in use, "git branch -d" allowed 310 deletion of a branch that is checked out in another worktree, 311 which was wrong. 312 313 * When "git worktree" feature is in use, "git branch -m" renamed a 314 branch that is checked out in another worktree without adjusting 315 the HEAD symbolic ref for the worktree. 316 317 * "git diff -M" used to work better when two originally identical 318 files A and B got renamed to X/A and X/B by pairing A to X/A and B 319 to X/B, but this was broken in the 2.0 timeframe. 320 321 * "git send-pack --all <there>" was broken when its command line 322 option parsing was written in the 2.6 timeframe. 323 324 * "git format-patch --help" showed `-s` and `--no-patch` as if these 325 are valid options to the command. We already hide `--patch` option 326 from the documentation, because format-patch is about showing the 327 diff, and the documentation now hides these options as well. 328 329 * When running "git blame $path" with unnormalized data in the index 330 for the path, the data in the working tree was blamed, even though 331 "git add" would not have changed what is already in the index, due 332 to "safe crlf" that disables the line-end conversion. It has been 333 corrected. 334 335 * A change back in version 2.7 to "git branch" broke display of a 336 symbolic ref in a non-standard place in the refs/ hierarchy (we 337 expect symbolic refs to appear in refs/remotes/*/HEAD to point at 338 the primary branch the remote has, and as .git/HEAD to point at the 339 branch we locally checked out). 340 341 * A partial rewrite of "git submodule" in the 2.7 timeframe changed 342 the way the gitdir: pointer in the submodules point at the real 343 repository location to use absolute paths by accident. This has 344 been corrected. 345 346 * "git commit" misbehaved in a few minor ways when an empty message 347 is given via -m '', all of which has been corrected. 348 349 * Support for CRAM-MD5 authentication method in "git imap-send" did 350 not work well. 351 352 * Upcoming OpenSSL 1.1.0 will break compilation by updating a few API 353 elements we use in imap-send, which has been adjusted for the change. 354 355 * The socks5:// proxy support added back in 2.6.4 days was not aware 356 that socks5h:// proxies behave differently from socks5:// proxies. 357 358 * "git config" had a codepath that tried to pass a NULL to 359 printf("%s"), which nobody seems to have noticed. 360 361 * On Cygwin, object creation uses the "create a temporary and then 362 rename it to the final name" pattern, not "create a temporary, 363 hardlink it to the final name and then unlink the temporary" 364 pattern. 365 366 This is necessary to use Git on Windows shared directories, and is 367 already enabled for the MinGW and plain Windows builds. It also 368 has been used in Cygwin packaged versions of Git for quite a while. 369 See http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/291853 370 371 * "merge-octopus" strategy did not ensure that the index is clean 372 when merge begins. 373 374 * When "git merge" notices that the merge can be resolved purely at 375 the tree level (without having to merge blobs) and the resulting 376 tree happens to already exist in the object store, it forgot to 377 update the index, which left an inconsistent state that would 378 break later operations. 379 380 * "git submodule" reports the paths of submodules the command 381 recurses into, but these paths were incorrectly reported when 382 the command was not run from the root level of the superproject. 383 384 * The "user.useConfigOnly" configuration variable makes it an error 385 if users do not explicitly set user.name and user.email. However, 386 its check was not done early enough and allowed another error to 387 trigger, reporting that the default value we guessed from the 388 system setting was unusable. This was a suboptimal end-user 389 experience as we want the users to set user.name/user.email without 390 relying on the auto-detection at all. 391 392 * "git mv old new" did not adjust the path for a submodule that lives 393 as a subdirectory inside old/ directory correctly. 394 395 * "git replace -e" did not honour "core.editor" configuration. 396 397 * "git push" from a corrupt repository that attempts to push a large 398 number of refs deadlocked; the thread to relay rejection notices 399 for these ref updates blocked on writing them to the main thread, 400 after the main thread at the receiving end notices that the push 401 failed and decides not to read these notices and return a failure. 402 403 * mmap emulation on Windows has been optimized and work better without 404 consuming paging store when not needed. 405 406 * A question by "git send-email" to ask the identity of the sender 407 has been updated. 408 409 * UI consistency improvements for "git mergetool". 410 411 * "git rebase -m" could be asked to rebase an entire branch starting 412 from the root, but failed by assuming that there always is a parent 413 commit to the first commit on the branch. 414 415 * Fix a broken "p4 lfs" test. 416 417 * Recent update to Git LFS broke "git p4" by changing the output from 418 its "lfs pointer" subcommand. 419 420 * "git fetch" test t5510 was flaky while running a (forced) automagic 421 garbage collection. 422 423 * Documentation updates to help contributors setting up Travis CI 424 test for their patches. 425 426 * Some multi-byte encoding can have a backslash byte as a later part 427 of one letter, which would confuse "highlight" filter used in 428 gitweb. 429 430 * "git commit-tree" plumbing command required the user to always sign 431 its result when the user sets the commit.gpgsign configuration 432 variable, which was an ancient mistake. Rework "git rebase" that 433 relied on this mistake so that it reads commit.gpgsign and pass (or 434 not pass) the -S option to "git commit-tree" to keep the end-user 435 expectation the same, while teaching "git commit-tree" to ignore 436 the configuration variable. This will stop requiring the users to 437 sign commit objects used internally as an implementation detail of 438 "git stash". 439 440 * "http.cookieFile" configuration variable clearly wants a pathname, 441 but we forgot to treat it as such by e.g. applying tilde expansion. 442 443 * Consolidate description of tilde-expansion that is done to 444 configuration variables that take pathname to a single place. 445 446 * Correct faulty recommendation to use "git submodule deinit ." when 447 de-initialising all submodules, which would result in a strange 448 error message in a pathological corner case. 449 450 * Many 'linkgit:<git documentation page>' references were broken, 451 which are all fixed with this. 452 453 * "git rerere" can get confused by conflict markers deliberately left 454 by the inner merge step, because they are indistinguishable from 455 the real conflict markers left by the outermost merge which are 456 what the end user and "rerere" need to look at. This was fixed by 457 making the conflict markers left by the inner merges a bit longer. 458 (merge 0f9fd5c jc/ll-merge-internal later to maint). 459 460 * CI test was taught to build documentation pages. 461 462 * "git fsck" learned to catch NUL byte in a commit object as 463 potential error and warn. 464 465 * Portability enhancement for "rebase -i" to help platforms whose 466 shell does not like "for i in <empty>" (which is not POSIX-kosher). 467 468 * On Windows, .git and optionally any files whose name starts with a 469 dot are now marked as hidden, with a core.hideDotFiles knob to 470 customize this behaviour. 471 472 * Documentation for "git merge --verify-signatures" has been updated 473 to clarify that the signature of only the commit at the tip is 474 verified. Also the phrasing used for signature and key validity is 475 adjusted to align with that used by OpenPGP. 476 477 * A couple of bugs around core.autocrlf have been fixed. 478 479 * Many commands normalize command line arguments from NFD to NFC 480 variant of UTF-8 on OSX, but commands in the "diff" family did 481 not, causing "git diff $path" to complain that no such path is 482 known to Git. They have been taught to do the normalization. 483 484 * "git difftool" learned to handle unmerged paths correctly in 485 dir-diff mode. 486 487 * The "are we talking with TTY, doing an interactive session?" 488 detection has been updated to work better for "Git for Windows". 489 490 * We forgot to add "git log --decorate=auto" to documentation when we 491 added the feature back in v2.1.0 timeframe. 492 (merge 462cbb4 rj/log-decorate-auto later to maint). 493 494 * "git fast-import --export-marks" would overwrite the existing marks 495 file even when it makes a dump from its custom die routine. 496 Prevent it from doing so when we have an import-marks file but 497 haven't finished reading it. 498 (merge f4beed6 fc/fast-import-broken-marks-file later to maint). 499 500 * "git rebase -i", after it fails to auto-resolve the conflict, had 501 an unnecessary call to "git rerere" from its very early days, which 502 was spotted recently; the call has been removed. 503 (merge 7063693 js/rebase-i-dedup-call-to-rerere later to maint). 504 505 * Other minor clean-ups and documentation updates 506 (merge cd82b7a pa/cherry-pick-doc-typo later to maint). 507 (merge 2bb73ae rs/patch-id-use-skip-prefix later to maint). 508 (merge aa20cbc rs/apply-name-terminate later to maint).