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 169Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc. 170 171 * The code to list branches in "git branch" has been consolidated 172 with the more generic ref-filter API. 173 174 * Resource usage while enumerating refs from alternate object store 175 has been optimized to help receiving end of "push" that hosts a 176 repository with many "forks". 177 178 * The gitattributes machinery is being taught to work better in a 179 multi-threaded environment. 180 181 * "git rebase -i" starts using the recently updated "sequencer" code. 182 183 * Code and design clean-up for the refs API. 184 185 * The preload-index code has been taught not to bother with the index 186 entries that are paths that are not checked out by "sparse checkout". 187 188 * Some warning() messages from "git clean" were updated to show the 189 errno from failed system calls. 190 191 * The "parse_config_key()" API function has been cleaned up. 192 193 * A test that creates a confusing branch whose name is HEAD has been 194 corrected not to do so. 195 196 * The code that parses header fields in the commit object has been 197 updated for (micro)performance and code hygiene. 198 199 * An helper function to make it easier to append the result from 200 real_path() to a strbuf has been added. 201 202 * Reduce authentication round-trip over HTTP when the server supports 203 just a single authentication method. This also improves the 204 behaviour when Git is misconfigured to enable http.emptyAuth 205 against a server that does not authenticate without a username 206 (i.e. not using Kerberos etc., which makes http.emptyAuth 207 pointless). 208 209 * Windows port wants to use OpenSSL's implementation of SHA-1 210 routines, so let them. 211 212 * The t/perf performance test suite was not prepared to test not so 213 old versions of Git, but now it covers versions of Git that are not 214 so ancient. 215 216 * Add 32-bit Linux variant to the set of platforms to be tested with 217 Travis CI. 218 219 * "git branch --list" takes the "--abbrev" and "--no-abbrev" options 220 to control the output of the object name in its "-v"(erbose) 221 output, but a recent update started ignoring them; fix it before 222 the breakage reaches to any released version. 223 224 * Picking two versions of Git and running tests to make sure the 225 older one and the newer one interoperate happily has now become 226 possible. 227 228 * "uchar [40]" to "struct object_id" conversion continues. 229 230 * "git tag --contains" used to (ab)use the object bits to keep track 231 of the state of object reachability without clearing them after 232 use; this has been cleaned up and made to use the newer commit-slab 233 facility. 234 235 * The "debug" helper used in the test framework learned to run 236 a command under "gdb" interactively. 237 238 * The "detect attempt to create collisions" variant of SHA-1 239 implementation by Marc Stevens (CWI) and Dan Shumow (Microsoft) 240 has been integrated and made the default. 241 242 * The test framework learned to detect unterminated here documents. 243 244 * The name-hash used for detecting paths that are different only in 245 cases (which matter on case insensitive filesystems) has been 246 optimized to take advantage of multi-threading when it makes sense. 247 248 * An earlier version of sha1dc/sha1.c that was merged to 'master' 249 compiled incorrectly on Windows, which has been fixed. 250 251 * "what URL do we want to update this submodule?" and "are we 252 interested in this submodule?" are split into two distinct 253 concepts, and then the way used to express the latter got extended, 254 paving a way to make it easier to manage a project with many 255 submodules and make it possible to later extend use of multiple 256 worktrees for a project with submodules. 257 258 * Some debugging output from "git describe" were marked for l10n, 259 but some weren't. Mark missing ones for l10n. 260 261 262Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups. 263 264 265Fixes since v2.12 266----------------- 267 268Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.12 in the maintenance 269track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases' 270notes for details). 271 272 * "git repack --depth=<n>" for a long time busted the specified depth 273 when reusing delta from existing packs. This has been corrected. 274 275 * The code to parse the command line "git grep <patterns>... <rev> 276 [[--] <pathspec>...]" has been cleaned up, and a handful of bugs 277 have been fixed (e.g. we used to check "--" if it is a rev). 278 279 * "git ls-remote" and "git archive --remote" are designed to work 280 without being in a directory under Git's control. However, recent 281 updates revealed that we randomly look into a directory called 282 .git/ without actually doing necessary set-up when working in a 283 repository. Stop doing so. 284 285 * "git show-branch" expected there were only very short branch names 286 in the repository and used a fixed-length buffer to hold them 287 without checking for overflow. 288 289 * A caller of tempfile API that uses stdio interface to write to 290 files may ignore errors while writing, which is detected when 291 tempfile is closed (with a call to ferror()). By that time, the 292 original errno that may have told us what went wrong is likely to 293 be long gone and was overwritten by an irrelevant value. 294 close_tempfile() now resets errno to EIO to make errno at least 295 predictable. 296 297 * "git remote rm X", when a branch has remote X configured as the 298 value of its branch.*.remote, tried to remove branch.*.remote and 299 branch.*.merge and failed if either is unset. 300 301 * A "gc.log" file left by a backgrounded "gc --auto" disables further 302 automatic gc; it has been taught to run at least once a day (by 303 default) by ignoring a stale "gc.log" file that is too old. 304 305 * The code to parse "git -c VAR=VAL cmd" and set configuration 306 variable for the duration of cmd had two small bugs, which have 307 been fixed. 308 309 * user.email that consists of only cruft chars should consistently 310 error out, but didn't. 311 312 * "git upload-pack", which is a counter-part of "git fetch", did not 313 report a request for a ref that was not advertised as invalid. 314 This is generally not a problem (because "git fetch" will stop 315 before making such a request), but is the right thing to do. 316 317 * A leak in a codepath to read from a packed object in (rare) cases 318 has been plugged. 319 320 * When a redirected http transport gets an error during the 321 redirected request, we ignored the error we got from the server, 322 and ended up giving a not-so-useful error message. 323 324 * The patch subcommand of "git add -i" was meant to have paths 325 selection prompt just like other subcommand, unlike "git add -p" 326 directly jumps to hunk selection. Recently, this was broken and 327 "add -i" lost the paths selection dialog, but it now has been 328 fixed. 329 330 * Git v2.12 was shipped with an embarrassing breakage where various 331 operations that verify paths given from the user stopped dying when 332 seeing an issue, and instead later triggering segfault. 333 334 * There is no need for Python only to give a few messages to the 335 standard error stream, but we somehow did. 336 337 * The code to parse "git log -L..." command line was buggy when there 338 are many ranges specified with -L; overrun of the allocated buffer 339 has been fixed. 340 341 * The command-line parsing of "git log -L" copied internal data 342 structures using incorrect size on ILP32 systems. 343 344 * "git diff --quiet" relies on the size field in diff_filespec to be 345 correctly populated, but diff_populate_filespec() helper function 346 made an incorrect short-cut when asked only to populate the size 347 field for paths that need to go through convert_to_git() (e.g. CRLF 348 conversion). 349 350 * A few tests were run conditionally under (rare) conditions where 351 they cannot be run (like running cvs tests under 'root' account). 352 353 * "git branch @" created refs/heads/@ as a branch, and in general the 354 code that handled @{-1} and @{upstream} was a bit too loose in 355 disambiguating. 356 357 * "git fetch" that requests a commit by object name, when the other 358 side does not allow such an request, failed without much 359 explanation. 360 361 * "git filter-branch --prune-empty" drops a single-parent commit that 362 becomes a no-op, but did not drop a root commit whose tree is empty. 363 364 * Recent versions of Git treats http alternates (used in dumb http 365 transport) just like HTTP redirects and requires the client to 366 enable following it, due to security concerns. But we forgot to 367 give a warning when we decide not to honor the alternates. 368 369 * "git push" had a handful of codepaths that could lead to a deadlock 370 when unexpected error happened, which has been fixed. 371 372 * "Dumb http" transport used to misparse a nonsense http-alternates 373 response, which has been fixed. 374 375 * "git add -p <pathspec>" unnecessarily expanded the pathspec to a 376 list of individual files that matches the pathspec by running "git 377 ls-files <pathspec>", before feeding it to "git diff-index" to see 378 which paths have changes, because historically the pathspec 379 language supported by "diff-index" was weaker. These days they are 380 equivalent and there is no reason to internally expand it. This 381 helps both performance and avoids command line argument limit on 382 some platforms. 383 (merge 7288e12cce jk/add-i-use-pathspecs later to maint). 384 385 * "git status --porcelain" is supposed to give a stable output, but a 386 few strings were left as translatable by mistake. 387 388 * "git revert -m 0 $merge_commit" complained that reverting a merge 389 needs to say relative to which parent the reversion needs to 390 happen, as if "-m 0" weren't given. The correct diagnosis is that 391 "-m 0" does not refer to the first parent ("-m 1" does). This has 392 been fixed. 393 394 * Code to read submodule.<name>.ignore config did not state the 395 variable name correctly when giving an error message diagnosing 396 misconfiguration. 397 398 * Fix for NO_PTHREADS build. 399 400 * Fix for potential segv introduced in v2.11.0 and later (also 401 v2.10.2) to "git log --pickaxe-regex -S". 402 403 * A few unterminated here documents in tests were fixed, which in 404 turn revealed incorrect expectations the tests make. These tests 405 have been updated. 406 407 * Fix for NO_PTHREADS option. 408 (merge 2225e1ea20 bw/grep-recurse-submodules later to maint). 409 410 * Git now avoids blindly falling back to ".git" when the setup 411 sequence said we are _not_ in Git repository. A corner case that 412 happens to work right now may be broken by a call to die("BUG"). 413 (merge b1ef400eec jk/no-looking-at-dotgit-outside-repo-final later to maint). 414 415 * A few commands that recently learned the "--recurse-submodule" 416 option misbehaved when started from a subdirectory of the 417 superproject. 418 (merge b2dfeb7c00 bw/recurse-submodules-relative-fix later to maint). 419 420 * FreeBSD implementation of getcwd(3) behaved differently when an 421 intermediate directory is unreadable/unsearchable depending on the 422 length of the buffer provided, which our strbuf_getcwd() was not 423 aware of. strbuf_getcwd() has been taught to cope with it better. 424 (merge a54e938e5b rs/freebsd-getcwd-workaround later to maint). 425 426 * A recent update to "rebase -i" stopped running hooks for the "git 427 commit" command during "reword" action, which has been fixed. 428 429 * Removing an entry from a notes tree and then looking another note 430 entry from the resulting tree using the internal notes API 431 functions did not work as expected. No in-tree users of the API 432 has such access pattern, but it still is worth fixing. 433 434 * "git receive-pack" could have been forced to die by attempting 435 allocate an unreasonably large amount of memory with a crafted push 436 certificate; this has been fixed. 437 (merge f2214dede9 bc/push-cert-receive-fix later to maint). 438 439 * Other minor doc, test and build updates and code cleanups. 440 (merge df2a6e38b7 jk/pager-in-use later to maint). 441 (merge 75ec4a6cb0 ab/branch-list-doc later to maint). 442 (merge 3e5b36c637 sg/skip-prefix-in-prettify-refname later to maint). 443 (merge 2c5e2865cc jk/fast-import-cleanup later to maint). 444 (merge 4473060bc2 ab/test-readme-updates later to maint). 445 (merge 48a96972fd ab/doc-submitting later to maint). 446 (merge f5c2bc2b96 jk/make-coccicheck-detect-errors later to maint).