Documentation / RelNotes / 2.1.0.txton commit Merge branch 'rs/blame-refactor' (8d87e35)
   1Git v2.1 Release Notes
   2======================
   3
   4Backward compatibility notes
   5----------------------------
   6
   7 * The default value we give to the environment variable LESS has been
   8   changed from "FRSX" to "FRX", losing "S" (chop long lines instead
   9   of wrapping).  Existing users who prefer not to see line-wrapped
  10   output may want to set
  11
  12     $ git config core.pager "less -S"
  13
  14   to restore the traditional behaviour.  It is expected that people
  15   find output from the most subcommands easier to read with the new
  16   default, except for "blame" which tends to produce really long
  17   lines.  To override the new default only for "git blame", you can
  18   do this:
  19
  20     $ git config pager.blame "less -S"
  21
  22 * A few disused directories in contrib/ have been retired.
  23
  24
  25Updates since v2.0
  26------------------
  27
  28UI, Workflows & Features
  29
  30 * Since the very beginning of Git, we gave the LESS environment a
  31   default value "FRSX" when we spawn "less" as the pager.  "S" (chop
  32   long lines instead of wrapping) has been removed from this default
  33   set of options, because it is more or less a personal taste thing,
  34   as opposed to others that have good justifications (i.e. "R" is
  35   very much justified because many kinds of output we produce are
  36   colored and "FX" is justified because output we produce is often
  37   shorter than a page).
  38
  39 * The logic and data used to compute the display width needed for
  40   UTF-8 strings have been updated to match Unicode 6.3 better.
  41
  42 * HTTP-based transports learned to propagate the error messages from
  43   the webserver better to the client coming over the HTTP transport.
  44
  45 * The "core.preloadindex" configuration variable is by default
  46   enabled, allowing modern platforms to take advantage of the
  47   multiple cores they have.
  48
  49 * "git commit --date=<date>" option learned to read from more
  50   timestamp formats, including "--date=now".
  51
  52 * The `core.commentChar` configuration variable is used to specify a
  53   custom comment character other than the default "#" to be used in
  54   the commit log editor.  This can be set to `auto` to attempt to
  55   choose a different character that does not conflict with what
  56   already starts a line in the message being edited for cases like
  57   "git commit --amend".
  58
  59 * "git format-patch" learned --signature-file=<file> to take the mail
  60   signature from.
  61
  62 * "git grep" learned grep.fullname configuration variable to force
  63   "--full-name" to be default.  This may cause regressions on
  64   scripted users that do not expect this new behaviour.
  65
  66 * "git imap-send" learned to ask the credential helper for auth
  67   material.
  68
  69 * "git log" and friends now understand the value "auto" set to the
  70   "log.decorate" configuration variable to enable the "--decorate"
  71   option automatically when the output is sent to tty.
  72
  73 * "git merge" without argument, even when there is an upstream
  74   defined for the current branch, refused to run until
  75   merge.defaultToUpstream is set to true.  Flip the default of that
  76   configuration variable to true.
  77
  78 * "git mergetool" learned to drive the vimdiff3 backend.
  79
  80 * mergetool.prompt used to default to 'true', always asking "do you
  81   really want to run the tool on this path?".  Among the two
  82   purposes this prompt serves, ignore the use case to confirm that
  83   the user wants to view particular path with the named tool, and
  84   redefine the meaning of the prompt only to confirm the choice of
  85   the tool made by the autodetection (for those who configured the
  86   tool explicitly, the prompt shown for the latter purpose is
  87   simply annoying).
  88
  89   Strictly speaking, this is a backward incompatible change and the
  90   users need to explicitly set the variable to 'true' if they want
  91   to resurrect the now-ignored use case.
  92
  93 * "git replace" learned the "--edit" subcommand.
  94
  95 * "git send-email" learned "--to-cover" and "--cc-cover" options, to
  96   tell it to copy To: and Cc: headers found in the first input file
  97   when emitting later input files.
  98
  99 * "git svn" learned to cope with malformed timestamps with only one
 100   digit in the hour part, e.g. 2014-01-07T5:01:02.048176Z, emitted
 101   by some broken subversion server implementations.
 102
 103 * "git tag" when editing the tag message shows the name of the tag
 104   being edited as a comment in the editor.
 105
 106
 107Performance, Internal Implementation, etc.
 108
 109 * Build procedure for 'subtree' (in contrib/) has been cleaned up.
 110
 111 * The `core.deltabasecachelimit` used to default to 16 MiB , but this
 112   proved to be too small, and has been bumped to 96 MiB.
 113
 114 * "git blame" has been optimized greatly by reorganising the data
 115   structure that is used to keep track of the work to be done.
 116
 117 * "git diff" that compares 3-or-more trees (e.g. parents and the
 118   result of a merge) have been optimized.
 119
 120 * The API to update/delete references are being converted to handle
 121   updates to multiple references in a transactional way.  As an
 122   example, "update-ref --stdin [-z]" has been updated to use this
 123   API.
 124
 125 * Parts of the test scripts can be skipped by using a range notation,
 126   e.g. "sh t1234-test.sh --run='1-4 6 8-'" to omit test piece 5 and 7
 127   and run everything else.
 128
 129
 130Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
 131
 132
 133Fixes since v2.0
 134----------------
 135
 136Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.0 in the maintenance
 137track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases'
 138notes for details).
 139
 140 * We used to unconditionally disable the pager in the pager process
 141   we spawn to feed out output, but that prevented people who want to
 142   run "less" within "less" from doing so.
 143   (merge c0459ca je/pager-do-not-recurse later to maint).
 144
 145 * Tools that read diagnostic output in our standard error stream do
 146   not want to see terminal control sequence (e.g. erase-to-eol).
 147   Detect them by checking if the standard error stream is connected
 148   to a tty.
 149   (merge 38de156 mn/sideband-no-ansi later to maint).
 150
 151 * Mishandling of patterns in .gitignore that has trailing SPs quoted
 152   with backslashes (e.g. ones that end with "\ ") have been
 153   corrected.
 154   (merge e61a6c1 pb/trim-trailing-spaces later to maint).
 155
 156 * Reworded the error message given upon a failure to open an existing
 157   loose object file due to e.g. permission issues; it was reported as
 158   the object being corrupt, but that is not quite true.
 159   (merge d6c8a05 jk/report-fail-to-read-objects-better later to maint).
 160
 161 * "git log -2master" is a common typo that shows two commits starting
 162   from whichever random branch that is not 'master' that happens to
 163   be checked out currently.
 164   (merge e3fa568 jc/revision-dash-count-parsing later to maint).
 165
 166 * The "%<(10,trunc)%s" pretty format specifier in the log family of
 167   commands is used to truncate the string to a given length (e.g. 10
 168   in the example) with padding to column-align the output, but did
 169   not take into account that number of bytes and number of display
 170   columns are different.
 171   (merge 7d50987 as/pretty-truncate later to maint).
 172
 173 * The "mailmap.file" configuration option did not support the tilde
 174   expansion (i.e. ~user/path and ~/path).
 175   (merge 9352fd5 ow/config-mailmap-pathname later to maint).
 176
 177 * The completion scripts (in contrib/) did not know about quite a few
 178   options that are common between "git merge" and "git pull", and a
 179   couple of options unique to "git merge".
 180   (merge 8fee872 jk/complete-merge-pull later to maint).
 181
 182 * "--ignore-space-change" option of "git apply" ignored the spaces
 183   at the beginning of line too aggressively, which is inconsistent
 184   with the option of the same name "diff" and "git diff" have.
 185   (merge 14d3bb4 jc/apply-ignore-whitespace later to maint).
 186
 187 * "git blame" miscounted number of columns needed to show localized
 188   timestamps, resulting in jaggy left-side-edge of the source code
 189   lines in its output.
 190   (merge dd75553 jx/blame-align-relative-time later to maint).
 191
 192 * "git blame" assigned the blame to the copy in the working-tree if
 193   the repository is set to core.autocrlf=input and the file used CRLF
 194   line endings.
 195   (merge 4d4813a bc/blame-crlf-test later to maint).
 196
 197 * "git commit --allow-empty-messag -C $commit" did not work when the
 198   commit did not have any log message.
 199   (merge 076cbd6 jk/commit-C-pick-empty later to maint).
 200
 201 * "git diff --find-copies-harder" sometimes pretended as if the mode
 202   bits have changed for paths that are marked with assume-unchanged
 203   bit.
 204   (merge 5304810 jk/diff-files-assume-unchanged later to maint).
 205
 206 * "git format-patch" did not enforce the rule that the "--follow"
 207   option from the log/diff family of commands must be used with
 208   exactly one pathspec.
 209   (merge dd63f16 jk/diff-follow-must-take-one-pathspec later to maint).
 210
 211 * "git gc --auto" was recently changed to run in the background to
 212   give control back early to the end-user sitting in front of the
 213   terminal, but it forgot that housekeeping involving reflogs should
 214   be done without other processes competing for accesses to the refs.
 215   (merge 62aad18 nd/daemonize-gc later to maint).
 216
 217 * "git grep -O" to show the lines that hit in the pager did not work
 218   well with case insensitive search.  We now spawn "less" with its
 219   "-I" option when it is used as the pager (which is the default).
 220   (merge f7febbe sk/spawn-less-case-insensitively-from-grep-O-i later to maint).
 221
 222 * We used to disable threaded "git index-pack" on platforms without
 223   thread-safe pread(); use a different workaround for such
 224   platforms to allow threaded "git index-pack".
 225   (merge 3953949 nd/index-pack-one-fd-per-thread later to maint).
 226
 227 * The error reporting from "git index-pack" has been improved to
 228   distinguish missing objects from type errors.
 229   (merge 77583e7 jk/index-pack-report-missing later to maint).
 230
 231 * "git mailinfo" used to read beyond the end of header string while
 232   parsing an incoming e-mail message to extract the patch.
 233   (merge b1a013d rs/mailinfo-header-cmp later to maint).
 234
 235 * On a case insensitive filesystem, merge-recursive incorrectly
 236   deleted the file that is to be renamed to a name that is the same
 237   except for case differences.
 238   (merge baa37bf dt/merge-recursive-case-insensitive later to maint).
 239
 240 * "git pack-objects" unnecessarily copied the previous contents when
 241   extending the hashtable, even though it will populate the table
 242   from scratch anyway.
 243   (merge fb79947 rs/pack-objects-no-unnecessary-realloc later to maint).
 244
 245 * "git rerere forget" did not work well when merge.conflictstyle
 246   was set to a non-default value.
 247   (merge de3d8bb fc/rerere-conflict-style later to maint).
 248
 249 * "git remote rm" and "git remote prune" can involve removing many
 250   refs at once, which is not a very efficient thing to do when very
 251   many refs exist in the packed-refs file.
 252   (merge e6bea66 jl/remote-rm-prune later to maint).
 253
 254 * "git log --exclude=<glob> --all | git shortlog" worked as expected,
 255   but "git shortlog --exclude=<glob> --all", which is supposed to be
 256   identical to the above pipeline, was not accepted at the command
 257   line argument parser level.
 258   (merge eb07774 jc/shortlog-ref-exclude later to maint).
 259
 260 * The autostash mode of "git rebase -i" did not restore the dirty
 261   working tree state if the user aborted the interactive rebase by
 262   emptying the insn sheet.
 263   (merge ddb5432 rr/rebase-autostash-fix later to maint).
 264
 265 * "git show -s" (i.e. show log message only) used to incorrectly emit
 266   an extra blank line after a merge commit.
 267   (merge ad2f725 mk/show-s-no-extra-blank-line-for-merges later to maint).
 268
 269 * "git status", even though it is a read-only operation, tries to
 270   update the index with refreshed lstat(2) info to optimize future
 271   accesses to the working tree opportunistically, but this could
 272   race with a "read-write" operation that modify the index while it
 273   is running.  Detect such a race and avoid overwriting the index.
 274   (merge 426ddee ym/fix-opportunistic-index-update-race later to maint).
 275
 276 * "git status" (and "git commit") behaved as if changes in a modified
 277   submodule are not there if submodule.*.ignore configuration is set,
 278   which was misleading.  The configuration is only to unclutter diff
 279   output during the course of development, and should not to hide
 280   changes in the "status" output to cause the users forget to commit
 281   them.
 282   (merge c215d3d jl/status-added-submodule-is-never-ignored later to maint).
 283
 284 * "git update-index --cacheinfo" in 2.0 release crashed on a
 285   malformed command line.
 286   (merge c8e1ee4 jc/rev-parse-argh-dashed-multi-words later to maint).
 287
 288 * The mode to run tests with HTTP server tests disabled was broken.
 289   (merge afa53fe na/no-http-test-in-the-middle later to maint).