Documentation / RelNotes / 2.8.0.txton commit grep/pcre: prepare locale-dependent tables for icase matching (9d9babb)
   1Git 2.8 Release Notes
   2=====================
   3
   4Updates since v2.7
   5------------------
   6
   7UI, Workflows & Features
   8
   9 * "branch --delete" has "branch -d" but "push --delete" does not.
  10
  11 * "git blame" learned to produce the progress eye-candy when it takes
  12   too much time before emitting the first line of the result.
  13
  14 * "git grep" can now be configured (or told from the command line)
  15   how many threads to use when searching in the working tree files.
  16
  17 * Some "git notes" operations, e.g. "git log --notes=<note>", should
  18   be able to read notes from any tree-ish that is shaped like a notes
  19   tree, but the notes infrastructure required that the argument must
  20   be a ref under refs/notes/.  Loosen it to require a valid ref only
  21   when the operation would update the notes (in which case we must
  22   have a place to store the updated notes tree, iow, a ref).
  23
  24 * "git grep" by default does not fall back to its "--no-index"
  25   behaviour outside a directory under Git's control (otherwise the
  26   user may by mistake end up running a huge recursive search); with a
  27   new configuration (set in $HOME/.gitconfig--by definition this
  28   cannot be set in the config file per project), this safety can be
  29   disabled.
  30
  31 * "git pull --rebase" has been extended to allow invoking
  32   "rebase -i".
  33
  34 * "git p4" learned to cope with the type of a file getting changed.
  35
  36 * "git format-patch" learned to notice format.outputDirectory
  37   configuration variable.  This allows "-o <dir>" option to be
  38   omitted on the command line if you always use the same directory in
  39   your workflow.
  40
  41 * "interpret-trailers" has been taught to optionally update a file in
  42   place, instead of always writing the result to the standard output.
  43
  44 * Many commands that read files that are expected to contain text
  45   that is generated (or can be edited) by the end user to control
  46   their behaviour (e.g. "git grep -f <filename>") have been updated
  47   to be more tolerant to lines that are terminated with CRLF (they
  48   used to treat such a line to contain payload that ends with CR,
  49   which is usually not what the users expect).
  50
  51 * "git notes merge" used to limit the source of the merged notes tree
  52   to somewhere under refs/notes/ hierarchy, which was too limiting
  53   when inventing a workflow to exchange notes with remote
  54   repositories using remote-tracking notes trees (located in e.g.
  55   refs/remote-notes/ or somesuch).
  56
  57 * "git ls-files" learned a new "--eol" option to help diagnose
  58   end-of-line problems.
  59
  60 * "ls-remote" learned an option to show which branch the remote
  61   repository advertises as its primary by pointing its HEAD at.
  62
  63 * New http.proxyAuthMethod configuration variable can be used to
  64   specify what authentication method to use, as a way to work around
  65   proxies that do not give error response expected by libcurl when
  66   CURLAUTH_ANY is used.  Also, the codepath for proxy authentication
  67   has been taught to use credential API to store the authentication
  68   material in user's keyrings.
  69
  70
  71Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.
  72
  73 * Add a framework to spawn a group of processes in parallel, and use
  74   it to run "git fetch --recurse-submodules" in parallel.
  75
  76 * A slight update to the Makefile to mark "phoney" targets
  77   as such correctly.
  78
  79 * In-core storage of the reverse index for .pack files (which lets
  80   you go from a pack offset to an object name) has been streamlined.
  81
  82 * d95138e6 (setup: set env $GIT_WORK_TREE when work tree is set, like
  83   $GIT_DIR, 2015-06-26) attempted to work around a glitch in alias
  84   handling by overwriting GIT_WORK_TREE environment variable to
  85   affect subprocesses when set_git_work_tree() gets called, which
  86   resulted in a rather unpleasant regression to "clone" and "init".
  87   Try to address the same issue by always restoring the environment
  88   and respawning the real underlying command when handling alias.
  89
  90 * The low-level code that is used to create symbolic references has
  91   been updated to share more code with the code that deals with
  92   normal references.
  93
  94 * strbuf_getline() and friends have been redefined to make it easier
  95   to identify which callsite of (new) strbuf_getline_lf() should
  96   allow and silently ignore carriage-return at the end of the line to
  97   help users on DOSsy systems.
  98
  99 * "git shortlog" used to accumulate various pieces of information
 100   regardless of what was asked to be shown in the final output.  It
 101   has been optimized by noticing what need not to be collected
 102   (e.g. there is no need to collect the log messages when showing
 103   only the number of changes).
 104
 105 * "git checkout $branch" (and other operations that share the same
 106   underlying machinery) has been optimized.
 107
 108 * Automated tests in Travis CI environment has been optimized by
 109   persisting runtime statistics of previous "prove" run, executing
 110   tests that take longer before other ones; this reduces the total
 111   wallclock time.
 112
 113
 114Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
 115
 116
 117Fixes since v2.7
 118----------------
 119
 120Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.7 in the maintenance
 121track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases'
 122notes for details).
 123
 124 * An earlier change in 2.5.x-era broke users' hooks and aliases by
 125   exporting GIT_WORK_TREE to point at the root of the working tree,
 126   interfering when they tried to use a different working tree without
 127   setting GIT_WORK_TREE environment themselves.
 128   (merge df1e6ea nd/stop-setenv-work-tree later to maint).
 129
 130 * The "exclude_list" structure has the usual "alloc, nr" pair of
 131   fields to be used by ALLOC_GROW(), but clear_exclude_list() forgot
 132   to reset 'alloc' to 0 when it cleared 'nr' to discard the managed
 133   array.
 134   (merge 2653a8c nd/dir-exclude-cleanup later to maint).
 135
 136 * Paths that have been told the index about with "add -N" are not
 137   quite yet in the index, but a few commands behaved as if they
 138   already are in a harmful way.
 139   (merge 4d55200 nd/ita-cleanup later to maint).
 140
 141 * "git send-email" was confused by escaped quotes stored in the alias
 142   files saved by "mutt", which has been corrected.
 143   (merge 2c510f2 ew/send-email-mutt-alias-fix later to maint).
 144
 145 * A few unportable C construct have been spotted by clang compiler
 146   and have been fixed.
 147   (merge a0df2e5 jk/clang-pedantic later to maint).
 148
 149 * The documentation has been updated to hint the connection between
 150   the '--signoff' option and DCO.
 151   (merge b2c150d dw/signoff-doc later to maint).
 152
 153 * "git reflog" incorrectly assumed that all objects that used to be
 154   at the tip of a ref must be commits, which caused it to segfault.
 155   (merge aecad37 dk/reflog-walk-with-non-commit later to maint).
 156
 157 * The ignore mechanism saw a few regressions around untracked file
 158   listing and sparse checkout selection areas in 2.7.0; the change
 159   that is responsible for the regression has been reverted.
 160   (merge 8c72236 nd/exclusion-regression-fix later to maint).
 161
 162 * Some codepaths used fopen(3) when opening a fixed path in $GIT_DIR
 163   (e.g. COMMIT_EDITMSG) that is meant to be left after the command is
 164   done.  This however did not work well if the repository is set to
 165   be shared with core.sharedRepository and the umask of the previous
 166   user is tighter.  They have been made to work better by calling
 167   unlink(2) and retrying after fopen(3) fails with EPERM.
 168   (merge ea56518 js/fopen-harder later to maint).
 169
 170 * Asking gitweb for a nonexistent commit left a warning in the server
 171   log.
 172
 173   Somebody may want to follow this up with an additional test, perhaps?
 174   IIRC, we do test that no Perl warnings are given to the server log,
 175   so this should have been caught if our test coverage were good.
 176   (merge a9eb90a ho/gitweb-squelch-undef-warning later to maint).
 177
 178 * "git rebase", unlike all other callers of "gc --auto", did not
 179   ignore the exit code from "gc --auto".
 180   (merge 8c24f5b jk/ok-to-fail-gc-auto-in-rebase later to maint).
 181
 182 * Many codepaths that run "gc --auto" before exiting kept packfiles
 183   mapped and left the file descriptors to them open, which was not
 184   friendly to systems that cannot remove files that are open.  They
 185   now close the packs before doing so.
 186   (merge d562102 js/close-packs-before-gc later to maint).
 187
 188 * A recent optimization to filter-branch in v2.7.0 introduced a
 189   regression when --prune-empty filter is used, which has been
 190   corrected.
 191   (merge 1dc413e jk/filter-branch-no-index later to maint).
 192
 193 * The description for SANITY prerequisite the test suite uses has
 194   been clarified both in the comment and in the implementation.
 195   (merge 719c3da jk/sanity later to maint).
 196
 197 * "git tag" started listing a tag "foo" as "tags/foo" when a branch
 198   named "foo" exists in the same repository; remove this unnecessary
 199   disambiguation, which is a regression introduced in v2.7.0.
 200   (merge 0571979 jk/list-tag-2.7-regression later to maint).
 201
 202 * The way "git svn" uses auth parameter was broken by Subversion
 203   1.9.0 and later.
 204   (merge 0b66415 ew/svn-1.9.0-auth later to maint).
 205
 206 * The "split" subcommand of "git subtree" (in contrib/) incorrectly
 207   skipped merges when it shouldn't, which was corrected.
 208   (merge 933cfeb dw/subtree-split-do-not-drop-merge later to maint).
 209
 210 * A few options of "git diff" did not work well when the command was
 211   run from a subdirectory.
 212   (merge a97262c nd/diff-with-path-params later to maint).
 213
 214 * The command line completion learned a handful of additional options
 215   and command specific syntax.
 216   (merge fa4b5e3 jk/completion-rebase later to maint).
 217   (merge f7c2e1a pw/completion-show-branch later to maint).
 218   (merge d7d4ca8 pw/completion-stash later to maint).
 219   (merge e6414b4 tb/complete-word-diff-regex later to maint).
 220
 221 * dirname() emulation has been added, as Msys2 lacks it.
 222   (merge e7d5ce8 js/dirname-basename later to maint).
 223
 224 * The underlying machinery used by "ls-files -o" and other commands
 225   have been taught not to create empty submodule ref cache for a
 226   directory that is not a submodule.  This removes a ton of wasted
 227   CPU cycles.
 228   (merge a2d5156 jk/ref-cache-non-repository-optim later to maint).
 229
 230 * Other minor clean-ups and documentation updates
 231   (merge 99487cf ss/user-manual later to maint).
 232   (merge e914ef0 ew/for-each-ref-doc later to maint).
 233   (merge 36fc7d8 sg/t6050-failing-editor-test-fix later to maint).
 234   (merge 60253a6 ss/clone-depth-single-doc later to maint).
 235   (merge bd02e97 lv/add-doc-working-tree later to maint).