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 will be removed in a 16 future release. 17 18 * The default location "~/.git-credential-cache/socket" for the 19 socket used to communicate with the credential-cache daemon has 20 been moved to "~/.cache/git/credential/socket". 21 22 23Updates since v2.12 24------------------- 25 26UI, Workflows & Features 27 28 * "git describe" and "git name-rev" have been taught to take more 29 than one refname patterns to restrict the set of refs to base their 30 naming output on, and also learned to take negative patterns to 31 name refs not to be used for naming via their "--exclude" option. 32 33 * Deletion of a branch "foo/bar" could remove .git/refs/heads/foo 34 once there no longer is any other branch whose name begins with 35 "foo/", but we didn't do so so far. Now we do. 36 37 * When "git merge" detects a path that is renamed in one history 38 while the other history deleted (or modified) it, it now reports 39 both paths to help the user understand what is going on in the two 40 histories being merged. 41 42 * The <url> part in "http.<url>.<variable>" configuration variable 43 can now be spelled with '*' that serves as wildcard. 44 E.g. "http.https://*.example.com.proxy" can be used to specify the 45 proxy used for https://a.example.com, https://b.example.com, etc., 46 i.e. any host in the example.com domain. 47 48 * "git tag" did not leave useful message when adding a new entry to 49 reflog; this was left unnoticed for a long time because refs/tags/* 50 doesn't keep reflog by default. 51 52 * The "negative" pathspec feature was somewhat more cumbersome to use 53 than necessary in that its short-hand used "!" which needed to be 54 escaped from shells, and it required "exclude from what?" specified. 55 56 * The command line options for ssh invocation needs to be tweaked for 57 some implementations of SSH (e.g. PuTTY plink wants "-P <port>" 58 while OpenSSH wants "-p <port>" to specify port to connect to), and 59 the variant was guessed when GIT_SSH environment variable is used 60 to specify it. The logic to guess now applies to the command 61 specified by the newer GIT_SSH_COMMAND and also core.sshcommand 62 configuration variable, and comes with an escape hatch for users to 63 deal with misdetected cases. 64 65 * The "--git-path", "--git-common-dir", and "--shared-index-path" 66 options of "git rev-parse" did not produce usable output. They are 67 now updated to show the path to the correct file, relative to where 68 the caller is. 69 70 * "git diff -W" has been taught to handle the case where a new 71 function is added at the end of the file better. 72 73 * "git update-ref -d" and other operations to delete references did 74 not leave any entry in HEAD's reflog when the reference being 75 deleted was the current branch. This is not a problem in practice 76 because you do not want to delete the branch you are currently on, 77 but caused renaming of the current branch to something else not to 78 be logged in a useful way. 79 80 * "Cc:" on the trailer part does not have to conform to RFC strictly, 81 unlike in the e-mail header. "git send-email" has been updated to 82 ignore anything after '>' when picking addresses, to allow non-address 83 cruft like " # stable 4.4" after the address. 84 85 * When "git submodule init" decides that the submodule in the working 86 tree is its upstream, it now gives a warning as it is not a very 87 common setup. 88 89 * "git stash push" takes a pathspec so that the local changes can be 90 stashed away only partially. 91 92 * Documentation for "git ls-files" did not refer to core.quotePath. 93 94 * The experimental "split index" feature has gained a few 95 configuration variables to make it easier to use. 96 97 * From a working tree of a repository, a new option of "rev-parse" 98 lets you ask if the repository is used as a submodule of another 99 project, and where the root level of the working tree of that 100 project (i.e. your superproject) is. 101 102 * The pathspec mechanism learned to further limit the paths that 103 match the pattern to those that have specified attributes attached 104 via the gitattributes mechanism. 105 106 * Our source code has used the SHA1_HEADER cpp macro after "#include" 107 in the C code to switch among the SHA-1 implementations. Instead, 108 list the exact header file names and switch among implementations 109 using "#ifdef BLK_SHA1/#include "block-sha1/sha1.h"/.../#endif"; 110 this helps some IDE tools. 111 112 * The start-up sequence of "git" needs to figure out some configured 113 settings before it finds and set itself up in the location of the 114 repository and was quite messy due to its "chicken-and-egg" nature. 115 The code has been restructured. 116 117 * The command line prompt (in contrib/) learned a new 'tag' style 118 that can be specified with GIT_PS1_DESCRIBE_STYLE, to describe a 119 detached HEAD with "git describe --tags". 120 121 * The configuration file learned a new "includeIf.<condition>.path" 122 that includes the contents of the given path only when the 123 condition holds. This allows you to say "include this work-related 124 bit only in the repositories under my ~/work/ directory". 125 126 * Recent update to "rebase -i" started showing a message that is not 127 a warning with "warning:" prefix by mistake. This has been fixed. 128 129 * Recently we started passing the "--push-options" through the 130 external remote helper interface; now the "smart HTTP" remote 131 helper understands what to do with the passed information. 132 133 * "git describe --dirty" dies when it cannot be determined if the 134 state in the working tree matches that of HEAD (e.g. broken 135 repository or broken submodule). The command learned a new option 136 "git describe --broken" to give "$name-broken" (where $name is the 137 description of HEAD) in such a case. 138 139 * "git checkout" is taught the "--recurse-submodules" option. 140 141 * Recent enhancement to "git stash push" command to support pathspec 142 to allow only a subset of working tree changes to be stashed away 143 was found to be too chatty and exposed the internal implementation 144 detail (e.g. when it uses reset to match the index to HEAD before 145 doing other things, output from reset seeped out). These, and 146 other chattyness has been fixed. 147 148 149Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc. 150 151 * The code to list branches in "git branch" has been consolidated 152 with the more generic ref-filter API. 153 154 * Resource usage while enumerating refs from alternate object store 155 has been optimized to help receiving end of "push" that hosts a 156 repository with many "forks". 157 158 * The gitattributes machinery is being taught to work better in a 159 multi-threaded environment. 160 161 * "git rebase -i" starts using the recently updated "sequencer" code. 162 163 * Code and design clean-up for the refs API. 164 165 * The preload-index code has been taught not to bother with the index 166 entries that are paths that are not checked out by "sparse checkout". 167 168 * Some warning() messages from "git clean" were updated to show the 169 errno from failed system calls. 170 171 * The "parse_config_key()" API function has been cleaned up. 172 173 * A test that creates a confusing branch whose name is HEAD has been 174 corrected not to do so. 175 176 * The code that parses header fields in the commit object has been 177 updated for (micro)performance and code hygiene. 178 179 * An helper function to make it easier to append the result from 180 real_path() to a strbuf has been added. 181 182 * Reduce authentication round-trip over HTTP when the server supports 183 just a single authentication method. This also improves the 184 behaviour when Git is misconfigured to enable http.emptyAuth 185 against a server that does not authenticate without a username 186 (i.e. not using Kerberos etc., which makes http.emptyAuth 187 pointless). 188 189 * Windows port wants to use OpenSSL's implementation of SHA-1 190 routines, so let them. 191 192 * The t/perf performance test suite was not prepared to test not so 193 old versions of Git, but now it covers versions of Git that are not 194 so ancient. 195 196 * Add 32-bit Linux variant to the set of platforms to be tested with 197 Travis CI. 198 199 * "git branch --list" takes the "--abbrev" and "--no-abbrev" options 200 to control the output of the object name in its "-v"(erbose) 201 output, but a recent update started ignoring them; fix it before 202 the breakage reaches to any released version. 203 204 * Picking two versions of Git and running tests to make sure the 205 older one and the newer one interoperate happily has now become 206 possible. 207 208 * "uchar [40]" to "struct object_id" conversion continues. 209 210 * "git tag --contains" used to (ab)use the object bits to keep track 211 of the state of object reachability without clearing them after 212 use; this has been cleaned up and made to use the newer commit-slab 213 facility. 214 215 * The "debug" helper used in the test framework learned to run 216 a command under "gdb" interactively. 217 218 * The "detect attempt to create collisions" variant of SHA-1 219 implementation by Marc Stevens (CWI) and Dan Shumow (Microsoft) 220 has been integrated and made the default. 221 222 * The test framework learned to detect unterminated here documents. 223 224 * The name-hash used for detecting paths that are different only in 225 cases (which matter on case insensitive filesystems) has been 226 optimized to take advantage of multi-threading when it makes sense. 227 228 * An earlier version of sha1dc/sha1.c that was merged to 'master' 229 compiled incorrectly on Windows, which has been fixed. 230 231 232Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups. 233 234 235Fixes since v2.12 236----------------- 237 238Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.12 in the maintenance 239track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases' 240notes for details). 241 242 * "git repack --depth=<n>" for a long time busted the specified depth 243 when reusing delta from existing packs. This has been corrected. 244 245 * The code to parse the command line "git grep <patterns>... <rev> 246 [[--] <pathspec>...]" has been cleaned up, and a handful of bugs 247 have been fixed (e.g. we used to check "--" if it is a rev). 248 249 * "git ls-remote" and "git archive --remote" are designed to work 250 without being in a directory under Git's control. However, recent 251 updates revealed that we randomly look into a directory called 252 .git/ without actually doing necessary set-up when working in a 253 repository. Stop doing so. 254 255 * "git show-branch" expected there were only very short branch names 256 in the repository and used a fixed-length buffer to hold them 257 without checking for overflow. 258 259 * A caller of tempfile API that uses stdio interface to write to 260 files may ignore errors while writing, which is detected when 261 tempfile is closed (with a call to ferror()). By that time, the 262 original errno that may have told us what went wrong is likely to 263 be long gone and was overwritten by an irrelevant value. 264 close_tempfile() now resets errno to EIO to make errno at least 265 predictable. 266 267 * "git remote rm X", when a branch has remote X configured as the 268 value of its branch.*.remote, tried to remove branch.*.remote and 269 branch.*.merge and failed if either is unset. 270 271 * A "gc.log" file left by a backgrounded "gc --auto" disables further 272 automatic gc; it has been taught to run at least once a day (by 273 default) by ignoring a stale "gc.log" file that is too old. 274 275 * The code to parse "git -c VAR=VAL cmd" and set configuration 276 variable for the duration of cmd had two small bugs, which have 277 been fixed. 278 279 * user.email that consists of only cruft chars should consistently 280 error out, but didn't. 281 282 * "git upload-pack", which is a counter-part of "git fetch", did not 283 report a request for a ref that was not advertised as invalid. 284 This is generally not a problem (because "git fetch" will stop 285 before making such a request), but is the right thing to do. 286 287 * A leak in a codepath to read from a packed object in (rare) cases 288 has been plugged. 289 290 * When a redirected http transport gets an error during the 291 redirected request, we ignored the error we got from the server, 292 and ended up giving a not-so-useful error message. 293 294 * The patch subcommand of "git add -i" was meant to have paths 295 selection prompt just like other subcommand, unlike "git add -p" 296 directly jumps to hunk selection. Recently, this was broken and 297 "add -i" lost the paths selection dialog, but it now has been 298 fixed. 299 300 * Git v2.12 was shipped with an embarrassing breakage where various 301 operations that verify paths given from the user stopped dying when 302 seeing an issue, and instead later triggering segfault. 303 304 * There is no need for Python only to give a few messages to the 305 standard error stream, but we somehow did. 306 307 * The code to parse "git log -L..." command line was buggy when there 308 are many ranges specified with -L; overrun of the allocated buffer 309 has been fixed. 310 311 * The command-line parsing of "git log -L" copied internal data 312 structures using incorrect size on ILP32 systems. 313 314 * "git diff --quiet" relies on the size field in diff_filespec to be 315 correctly populated, but diff_populate_filespec() helper function 316 made an incorrect short-cut when asked only to populate the size 317 field for paths that need to go through convert_to_git() (e.g. CRLF 318 conversion). 319 320 * A few tests were run conditionally under (rare) conditions where 321 they cannot be run (like running cvs tests under 'root' account). 322 323 * "git branch @" created refs/heads/@ as a branch, and in general the 324 code that handled @{-1} and @{upstream} was a bit too loose in 325 disambiguating. 326 327 * "git fetch" that requests a commit by object name, when the other 328 side does not allow such an request, failed without much 329 explanation. 330 331 * "git filter-branch --prune-empty" drops a single-parent commit that 332 becomes a no-op, but did not drop a root commit whose tree is empty. 333 334 * Recent versions of Git treats http alternates (used in dumb http 335 transport) just like HTTP redirects and requires the client to 336 enable following it, due to security concerns. But we forgot to 337 give a warning when we decide not to honor the alternates. 338 339 * "git push" had a handful of codepaths that could lead to a deadlock 340 when unexpected error happened, which has been fixed. 341 342 * "Dumb http" transport used to misparse a nonsense http-alternates 343 response, which has been fixed. 344 345 * "git add -p <pathspec>" unnecessarily expanded the pathspec to a 346 list of individual files that matches the pathspec by running "git 347 ls-files <pathspec>", before feeding it to "git diff-index" to see 348 which paths have changes, because historically the pathspec 349 language supported by "diff-index" was weaker. These days they are 350 equivalent and there is no reason to internally expand it. This 351 helps both performance and avoids command line argument limit on 352 some platforms. 353 (merge 7288e12cce jk/add-i-use-pathspecs later to maint). 354 355 * "git status --porcelain" is supposed to give a stable output, but a 356 few strings were left as translatable by mistake. 357 358 * "git revert -m 0 $merge_commit" complained that reverting a merge 359 needs to say relative to which parent the reversion needs to 360 happen, as if "-m 0" weren't given. The correct diagnosis is that 361 "-m 0" does not refer to the first parent ("-m 1" does). This has 362 been fixed. 363 364 * Code to read submodule.<name>.ignore config did not state the 365 variable name correctly when giving an error message diagnosing 366 misconfiguration. 367 368 * Fix for NO_PTHREADS build. 369 370 * Fix for potential segv introduced in v2.11.0 and later (also 371 v2.10.2) to "git log --pickaxe-regex -S". 372 373 * A few unterminated here documents in tests were fixed, which in 374 turn revealed incorrect expectations the tests make. These tests 375 have been updated. 376 377 * Fix for NO_PTHREADS option. 378 (merge 2225e1ea20 bw/grep-recurse-submodules later to maint). 379 380 * Other minor doc, test and build updates and code cleanups. 381 (merge df2a6e38b7 jk/pager-in-use later to maint). 382 (merge 75ec4a6cb0 ab/branch-list-doc later to maint). 383 (merge 3e5b36c637 sg/skip-prefix-in-prettify-refname later to maint). 384 (merge 2c5e2865cc jk/fast-import-cleanup later to maint).