1Git 2.11 Release Notes 2====================== 3 4Backward compatibility notes. 5 6 * An empty string used as a pathspec element has always meant 7 'everything matches', but it is too easy to write a script that 8 finds a path to remove in $path and run 'git rm "$paht"' by 9 mistake (when the user meant to give "$path"), which ends up 10 removing everything. This release starts warning about the 11 use of an empty string that is used for 'everything matches' and 12 asks users to use a more explicit '.' for that instead. 13 14 The hope is that existing users will not mind this change, and 15 eventually the warning can be turned into a hard error, upgrading 16 the deprecation into removal of this (mis)feature. 17 18 * The historical argument order "git merge <msg> HEAD <commit>..." 19 has been deprecated for quite some time, and will be removed in the 20 next release (not this one). 21 22 * The default abbreviation length, which has historically been 7, now 23 scales as the repository grows, using the approximate number of 24 objects in the repository and a bit of math around the birthday 25 paradox. The logic suggests to use 12 hexdigits for the Linux 26 kernel, and 9 to 10 for Git itself. 27 28 29Updates since v2.10 30------------------- 31 32UI, Workflows & Features 33 34 * Comes with new version of git-gui, now at its 0.21.0 tag. 35 36 * "git format-patch --cover-letter HEAD^" to format a single patch 37 with a separate cover letter now numbers the output as [PATCH 0/1] 38 and [PATCH 1/1] by default. 39 40 * An incoming "git push" that attempts to push too many bytes can now 41 be rejected by setting a new configuration variable at the receiving 42 end. 43 44 * "git nosuchcommand --help" said "No manual entry for gitnosuchcommand", 45 which was not intuitive, given that "git nosuchcommand" said "git: 46 'nosuchcommand' is not a git command". 47 48 * "git clone --recurse-submodules --reference $path $URL" is a way to 49 reduce network transfer cost by borrowing objects in an existing 50 $path repository when cloning the superproject from $URL; it 51 learned to also peek into $path for presence of corresponding 52 repositories of submodules and borrow objects from there when able. 53 54 * The "git diff --submodule={short,log}" mechanism has been enhanced 55 to allow "--submodule=diff" to show the patch between the submodule 56 commits bound to the superproject. 57 58 * Even though "git hash-objects", which is a tool to take an 59 on-filesystem data stream and put it into the Git object store, 60 allowed to perform the "outside-world-to-Git" conversions (e.g. 61 end-of-line conversions and application of the clean-filter), and 62 it had the feature on by default from very early days, its reverse 63 operation "git cat-file", which takes an object from the Git object 64 store and externalize for the consumption by the outside world, 65 lacked an equivalent mechanism to run the "Git-to-outside-world" 66 conversion. The command learned the "--filters" option to do so. 67 68 * Output from "git diff" can be made easier to read by selecting 69 which lines are common and which lines are added/deleted 70 intelligently when the lines before and after the changed section 71 are the same. A command line option is added to help with the 72 experiment to find a good heuristics. 73 74 * In some projects, it is common to use "[RFC PATCH]" as the subject 75 prefix for a patch meant for discussion rather than application. A 76 new option "--rfc" is a short-hand for "--subject-prefix=RFC PATCH" 77 to help the participants of such projects. 78 79 * "git add --chmod=+x <pathspec>" added recently only toggled the 80 executable bit for paths that are either new or modified. This has 81 been corrected to flip the executable bit for all paths that match 82 the given pathspec. 83 84 * When "git format-patch --stdout" output is placed as an in-body 85 header and it uses the RFC2822 header folding, "git am" failed to 86 put the header line back into a single logical line. The 87 underlying "git mailinfo" was taught to handle this properly. 88 89 * "gitweb" can spawn "highlight" to show blob contents with 90 (programming) language-specific syntax highlighting, but only 91 when the language is known. "highlight" can however be told 92 to make the guess itself by giving it "--force" option, which 93 has been enabled. 94 95 * "git gui" l10n to Portuguese. 96 97 * When given an abbreviated object name that is not (or more 98 realistically, "no longer") unique, we gave a fatal error 99 "ambiguous argument". This error is now accompanied by a hint that 100 lists the objects beginning with the given prefix. During the 101 course of development of this new feature, numerous minor bugs were 102 uncovered and corrected, the most notable one of which is that we 103 gave "short SHA1 xxxx is ambiguous." twice without good reason. 104 105 * "git log rev^..rev" is an often-used revision range specification 106 to show what was done on a side branch merged at rev. This has 107 gained a short-hand "rev^-1". In general "rev^-$n" is the same as 108 "^rev^$n rev", i.e. what has happened on other branches while the 109 history leading to nth parent was looking the other way. 110 111 * In recent versions of cURL, GSSAPI credential delegation is 112 disabled by default due to CVE-2011-2192; introduce a configuration 113 to selectively allow enabling this. 114 (merge 26a7b23429 ps/http-gssapi-cred-delegation later to maint). 115 116 * "git mergetool" learned to honor "-O<orderfile>" to control the 117 order of paths to present to the end user. 118 119 * "git diff/log --ws-error-highlight=<kind>" lacked the corresponding 120 configuration variable to set it by default. 121 122 * "git ls-files" learned "--recurse-submodules" option that can be 123 used to get a listing of tracked files across submodules (i.e. this 124 only works with "--cached" option, not for listing untracked or 125 ignored files). This would be a useful tool to sit on the upstream 126 side of a pipe that is read with xargs to work on all working tree 127 files from the top-level superproject. 128 129 * A new credential helper that talks via "libsecret" with 130 implementations of XDG Secret Service API has been added to 131 contrib/credential/. 132 133 * The GPG verification status shown in "%G?" pretty format specifier 134 was not rich enough to differentiate a signature made by an expired 135 key, a signature made by a revoked key, etc. New output letters 136 have been assigned to express them. 137 138 * In addition to purely abbreviated commit object names, "gitweb" 139 learned to turn "git describe" output (e.g. v2.9.3-599-g2376d31787) 140 into clickable links in its output. 141 142 * When new paths were added by "git add -N" to the index, it was 143 enough to circumvent the check by "git commit" to refrain from 144 making an empty commit without "--allow-empty". The same logic 145 prevented "git status" to show such a path as "new file" in the 146 "Changes not staged for commit" section. 147 148 * The smudge/clean filter API expect an external process is spawned 149 to filter the contents for each path that has a filter defined. A 150 new type of "process" filter API has been added to allow the first 151 request to run the filter for a path to spawn a single process, and 152 all filtering need is served by this single process for multiple 153 paths, reducing the process creation overhead. 154 155 * The user always has to say "stash@{$N}" when naming a single 156 element in the default location of the stash, i.e. reflogs in 157 refs/stash. The "git stash" command learned to accept "git stash 158 apply 4" as a short-hand for "git stash apply stash@{4}". 159 160 161Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc. 162 163 * The delta-base-cache mechanism has been a key to the performance in 164 a repository with a tightly packed packfile, but it did not scale 165 well even with a larger value of core.deltaBaseCacheLimit. 166 167 * Enhance "git status --porcelain" output by collecting more data on 168 the state of the index and the working tree files, which may 169 further be used to teach git-prompt (in contrib/) to make fewer 170 calls to git. 171 172 * Extract a small helper out of the function that reads the authors 173 script file "git am" internally uses. 174 (merge a77598e jc/am-read-author-file later to maint). 175 176 * Lifts calls to exit(2) and die() higher in the callchain in 177 sequencer.c files so that more helper functions in it can be used 178 by callers that want to handle error conditions themselves. 179 180 * "git am" has been taught to make an internal call to "git apply"'s 181 innards without spawning the latter as a separate process. 182 183 * The ref-store abstraction was introduced to the refs API so that we 184 can plug in different backends to store references. 185 186 * The "unsigned char sha1[20]" to "struct object_id" conversion 187 continues. Notable changes in this round includes that ce->sha1, 188 i.e. the object name recorded in the cache_entry, turns into an 189 object_id. 190 191 * JGit can show a fake ref "capabilities^{}" to "git fetch" when it 192 does not advertise any refs, but "git fetch" was not prepared to 193 see such an advertisement. When the other side disconnects without 194 giving any ref advertisement, we used to say "there may not be a 195 repository at that URL", but we may have seen other advertisement 196 like "shallow" and ".have" in which case we definitely know that a 197 repository is there. The code to detect this case has also been 198 updated. 199 200 * Some codepaths in "git pack-objects" were not ready to use an 201 existing pack bitmap; now they are and as the result they have 202 become faster. 203 204 * The codepath in "git fsck" to detect malformed tree objects has 205 been updated not to die but keep going after detecting them. 206 207 * We call "qsort(array, nelem, sizeof(array[0]), fn)", and most of 208 the time third parameter is redundant. A new QSORT() macro lets us 209 omit it. 210 211 * "git pack-objects" in a repository with many packfiles used to 212 spend a lot of time looking for/at objects in them; the accesses to 213 the packfiles are now optimized by checking the most-recently-used 214 packfile first. 215 (merge c9af708b1a jk/pack-objects-optim-mru later to maint). 216 217 * Codepaths involved in interacting alternate object store have 218 been cleaned up. 219 220 * In order for the receiving end of "git push" to inspect the 221 received history and decide to reject the push, the objects sent 222 from the sending end need to be made available to the hook and 223 the mechanism for the connectivity check, and this was done 224 traditionally by storing the objects in the receiving repository 225 and letting "git gc" to expire it. Instead, store the newly 226 received objects in a temporary area, and make them available by 227 reusing the alternate object store mechanism to them only while we 228 decide if we accept the check, and once we decide, either migrate 229 them to the repository or purge them immediately. 230 231 * The require_clean_work_tree() helper was recreated in C when "git 232 pull" was rewritten from shell; the helper is now made available to 233 other callers in preparation for upcoming "rebase -i" work. 234 235 * "git upload-pack" had its code cleaned-up and performance improved 236 by reducing use of timestamp-ordered commit-list, which was 237 replaced with a priority queue. 238 239 * "git diff --no-index" codepath has been updated not to try to peek 240 into .git/ directory that happens to be under the current 241 directory, when we know we are operating outside any repository. 242 243 * Update of the sequencer codebase to make it reusable to reimplement 244 "rebase -i" continues. 245 246 * Git generally does not explicitly close file descriptors that were 247 open in the parent process when spawning a child process, but most 248 of the time the child does not want to access them. As Windows does 249 not allow removing or renaming a file that has a file descriptor 250 open, a slow-to-exit child can even break the parent process by 251 holding onto them. Use O_CLOEXEC flag to open files in various 252 codepaths. 253 254 * Update "interpret-trailers" machinery and teaches it that people in 255 real world write all sorts of crufts in the "trailer" that was 256 originally designed to have the neat-o "Mail-Header: like thing" 257 and nothing else. 258 259 260Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups. 261 262 263Fixes since v2.10 264----------------- 265 266Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.9 in the maintenance 267track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases' 268notes for details). 269 270 * Clarify various ways to specify the "revision ranges" in the 271 documentation. 272 273 * "diff-highlight" script (in contrib/) learned to work better with 274 "git log -p --graph" output. 275 276 * The test framework left the number of tests and success/failure 277 count in the t/test-results directory, keyed by the name of the 278 test script plus the process ID. The latter however turned out not 279 to serve any useful purpose. The process ID part of the filename 280 has been removed. 281 282 * Having a submodule whose ".git" repository is somehow corrupt 283 caused a few commands that recurse into submodules loop forever. 284 285 * "git symbolic-ref -d HEAD" happily removes the symbolic ref, but 286 the resulting repository becomes an invalid one. Teach the command 287 to forbid removal of HEAD. 288 289 * A test spawned a short-lived background process, which sometimes 290 prevented the test directory from getting removed at the end of the 291 script on some platforms. 292 293 * Update a few tests that used to use GIT_CURL_VERBOSE to use the 294 newer GIT_TRACE_CURL. 295 296 * "git pack-objects --include-tag" was taught that when we know that 297 we are sending an object C, we want a tag B that directly points at 298 C but also a tag A that points at the tag B. We used to miss the 299 intermediate tag B in some cases. 300 301 * Update Japanese translation for "git-gui". 302 303 * "git fetch http::/site/path" did not die correctly and segfaulted 304 instead. 305 306 * "git commit-tree" stopped reading commit.gpgsign configuration 307 variable that was meant for Porcelain "git commit" in Git 2.9; we 308 forgot to update "git gui" to look at the configuration to match 309 this change. 310 311 * "git add --chmod=+x" added recently lacked documentation, which has 312 been corrected. 313 314 * "git log --cherry-pick" used to include merge commits as candidates 315 to be matched up with other commits, resulting a lot of wasted time. 316 The patch-id generation logic has been updated to ignore merges to 317 avoid the wastage. 318 319 * The http transport (with curl-multi option, which is the default 320 these days) failed to remove curl-easy handle from a curlm session, 321 which led to unnecessary API failures. 322 323 * There were numerous corner cases in which the configuration files 324 are read and used or not read at all depending on the directory a 325 Git command was run, leading to inconsistent behaviour. The code 326 to set-up repository access at the beginning of a Git process has 327 been updated to fix them. 328 (merge 4d0efa1 jk/setup-sequence-update later to maint). 329 330 * "git diff -W" output needs to extend the context backward to 331 include the header line of the current function and also forward to 332 include the body of the entire current function up to the header 333 line of the next one. This process may have to merge two adjacent 334 hunks, but the code forgot to do so in some cases. 335 336 * Performance tests done via "t/perf" did not use the same set of 337 build configuration if the user relied on autoconf generated 338 configuration. 339 340 * "git format-patch --base=..." feature that was recently added 341 showed the base commit information after "-- " e-mail signature 342 line, which turned out to be inconvenient. The base information 343 has been moved above the signature line. 344 345 * More i18n. 346 347 * Even when "git pull --rebase=preserve" (and the underlying "git 348 rebase --preserve") can complete without creating any new commit 349 (i.e. fast-forwards), it still insisted on having a usable ident 350 information (read: user.email is set correctly), which was less 351 than nice. As the underlying commands used inside "git rebase" 352 would fail with a more meaningful error message and advice text 353 when the bogus ident matters, this extra check was removed. 354 355 * "git gc --aggressive" used to limit the delta-chain length to 250, 356 which is way too deep for gaining additional space savings and is 357 detrimental for runtime performance. The limit has been reduced to 358 50. 359 360 * Documentation for individual configuration variables to control use 361 of color (like `color.grep`) said that their default value is 362 'false', instead of saying their default is taken from `color.ui`. 363 When we updated the default value for color.ui from 'false' to 364 'auto' quite a while ago, all of them broke. This has been 365 corrected. 366 367 * The pretty-format specifier "%C(auto)" used by the "log" family of 368 commands to enable coloring of the output is taught to also issue a 369 color-reset sequence to the output. 370 371 * A shell script example in check-ref-format documentation has been 372 fixed. 373 374 * "git checkout <word>" does not follow the usual disambiguation 375 rules when the <word> can be both a rev and a path, to allow 376 checking out a branch 'foo' in a project that happens to have a 377 file 'foo' in the working tree without having to disambiguate. 378 This was poorly documented and the check was incorrect when the 379 command was run from a subdirectory. 380 381 * Some codepaths in "git diff" used regexec(3) on a buffer that was 382 mmap(2)ed, which may not have a terminating NUL, leading to a read 383 beyond the end of the mapped region. This was fixed by introducing 384 a regexec_buf() helper that takes a <ptr,len> pair with REG_STARTEND 385 extension. 386 387 * The procedure to build Git on Mac OS X for Travis CI hardcoded the 388 internal directory structure we assumed HomeBrew uses, which was a 389 no-no. The procedure has been updated to ask HomeBrew things we 390 need to know to fix this. 391 392 * When "git rebase -i" is given a broken instruction, it told the 393 user to fix it with "--edit-todo", but didn't say what the step 394 after that was (i.e. "--continue"). 395 396 * Documentation around tools to import from CVS was fairly outdated. 397 398 * "git clone --recurse-submodules" lost the progress eye-candy in 399 recent update, which has been corrected. 400 401 * A low-level function verify_packfile() was meant to show errors 402 that were detected without dying itself, but under some conditions 403 it didn't and died instead, which has been fixed. 404 405 * When "git fetch" tries to find where the history of the repository 406 it runs in has diverged from what the other side has, it has a 407 mechanism to avoid digging too deep into irrelevant side branches. 408 This however did not work well over the "smart-http" transport due 409 to a design bug, which has been fixed. 410 411 * In the codepath that comes up with the hostname to be used in an 412 e-mail when the user didn't tell us, we looked at ai_canonname 413 field in struct addrinfo without making sure it is not NULL first. 414 415 * "git worktree", even though it used the default_abbrev setting that 416 ought to be affected by core.abbrev configuration variable, ignored 417 the variable setting. The command has been taught to read the 418 default set of configuration variables to correct this. 419 420 * "git init" tried to record core.worktree in the repository's 421 'config' file when GIT_WORK_TREE environment variable was set and 422 it was different from where GIT_DIR appears as ".git" at its top, 423 but the logic was faulty when .git is a "gitdir:" file that points 424 at the real place, causing trouble in working trees that are 425 managed by "git worktree". This has been corrected. 426 427 * Codepaths that read from an on-disk loose object were too loose in 428 validating what they are reading is a proper object file and 429 sometimes read past the data they read from the disk, which has 430 been corrected. H/t to Gustavo Grieco for reporting. 431 432 * The original command line syntax for "git merge", which was "git 433 merge <msg> HEAD <parent>...", has been deprecated for quite some 434 time, and "git gui" was the last in-tree user of the syntax. This 435 is finally fixed, so that we can move forward with the deprecation. 436 437 * An author name, that spelled a backslash-quoted double quote in the 438 human readable part "My \"double quoted\" name", was not unquoted 439 correctly while applying a patch from a piece of e-mail. 440 441 * Doc update to clarify what "log -3 --reverse" does. 442 443 * Almost everybody uses DEFAULT_ABBREV to refer to the default 444 setting for the abbreviation, but "git blame" peeked into 445 underlying variable bypassing the macro for no good reason. 446 447 * The "graph" API used in "git log --graph" miscounted the number of 448 output columns consumed so far when drawing a padding line, which 449 has been fixed; this did not affect any existing code as nobody 450 tried to write anything after the padding on such a line, though. 451 452 * The code that parses the format parameter of for-each-ref command 453 has seen a micro-optimization. 454 455 * When we started cURL to talk to imap server when a new enough 456 version of cURL library is available, we forgot to explicitly add 457 imap(s):// before the destination. To some folks, that didn't work 458 and the library tried to make HTTP(s) requests instead. 459 460 * The ./configure script generated from configure.ac was taught how 461 to detect support of SSL by libcurl better. 462 463 * The command-line completion script (in contrib/) learned to 464 complete "git cmd ^mas<HT>" to complete the negative end of 465 reference to "git cmd ^master". 466 (merge 49416ad22a cp/completion-negative-refs later to maint). 467 468 * The existing "git fetch --depth=<n>" option was hard to use 469 correctly when making the history of an existing shallow clone 470 deeper. A new option, "--deepen=<n>", has been added to make this 471 easier to use. "git clone" also learned "--shallow-since=<date>" 472 and "--shallow-exclude=<tag>" options to make it easier to specify 473 "I am interested only in the recent N months worth of history" and 474 "Give me only the history since that version". 475 (merge cccf74e2da nd/shallow-deepen later to maint). 476 477 * It is a common mistake to say "git blame --reverse OLD path", 478 expecting that the command line is dwimmed as if asking how lines 479 in path in an old revision OLD have survived up to the current 480 commit. 481 (merge e1d09701a4 jc/blame-reverse later to maint). 482 483 * http.emptyauth configuration is a way to allow an empty username to 484 pass when attempting to authenticate using mechanisms like 485 Kerberos. We took an unspecified (NULL) username and sent ":" 486 (i.e. no username, no password) to CURLOPT_USERPWD, but did not do 487 the same when the username is explicitly set to an empty string. 488 489 * "git clone" of a local repository can be done at the filesystem 490 level, but the codepath did not check errors while copying and 491 adjusting the file that lists alternate object stores. 492 493 * Documentation for "git commit" was updated to clarify that "commit 494 -p <paths>" adds to the current contents of the index to come up 495 with what to commit. 496 497 * A stray symbolic link in $GIT_DIR/refs/ directory could make name 498 resolution loop forever, which has been corrected. 499 500 * The "submodule.<name>.path" stored in .gitmodules is never copied 501 to .git/config and such a key in .git/config has no meaning, but 502 the documentation described it and submodule.<name>.url next to 503 each other as if both belong to .git/config. This has been fixed. 504 505 * In a worktree connected to a repository elsewhere, created via "git 506 worktree", "git checkout" attempts to protect users from confusion 507 by refusing to check out a branch that is already checked out in 508 another worktree. However, this also prevented checking out a 509 branch, which is designated as the primary branch of a bare 510 reopsitory, in a worktree that is connected to the bare 511 repository. The check has been corrected to allow it. 512 513 * "git rebase" immediately after "git clone" failed to find the fork 514 point from the upstream. 515 516 * When fetching from a remote that has many tags that are irrelevant 517 to branches we are following, we used to waste way too many cycles 518 when checking if the object pointed at by a tag (that we are not 519 going to fetch!) exists in our repository too carefully. 520 521 * Protect our code from over-eager compilers. 522 523 * Recent git allows submodule.<name>.branch to use a special token 524 "." instead of the branch name; the documentation has been updated 525 to describe it. 526 527 * A hot-fix for a test added by a recent topic that went to both 528 'master' and 'maint' already. 529 530 * "git send-email" attempts to pick up valid e-mails from the 531 trailers, but people in real world write non-addresses there, like 532 "Cc: Stable <add@re.ss> # 4.8+", which broke the output depending 533 on the availability and vintage of Mail::Address perl module. 534 (merge dcfafc5214 mm/send-email-cc-cruft-after-address later to maint). 535 536 * The Travis CI configuration we ship ran the tests with --verbose 537 option but this risks non-TAP output that happens to be "ok" to be 538 misinterpreted as TAP signalling a test that passed. This resulted 539 in unnecessary failure. This has been corrected by introducing a 540 new mode to run our tests in the test harness to send the verbose 541 output separately to the log file. 542 543 * Some AsciiDoc formatter mishandles a displayed illustration with 544 tabs in it. Adjust a few of them in merge-base documentation to 545 work around them. 546 547 * A minor regression fix for "git submodule" that was introduced 548 when more helper functions were reimplemented in C. 549 (merge 77b63ac31e sb/submodule-ignore-trailing-slash later to maint). 550 551 * The code that we have used for the past 10+ years to cycle 552 4-element ring buffers turns out to be not quite portable in 553 theoretical world. 554 (merge bb84735c80 rs/ring-buffer-wraparound later to maint). 555 556 * "git daemon" used fixed-length buffers to turn URL to the 557 repository the client asked for into the server side directory 558 path, using snprintf() to avoid overflowing these buffers, but 559 allowed possibly truncated paths to the directory. This has been 560 tightened to reject such a request that causes overlong path to be 561 required to serve. 562 (merge 6bdb0083be jk/daemon-path-ok-check-truncation later to maint). 563 564 * Recent update to git-sh-setup (a library of shell functions that 565 are used by our in-tree scripted Porcelain commands) included 566 another shell library git-sh-i18n without specifying where it is, 567 relying on the $PATH. This has been fixed to be more explicit by 568 prefixing $(git --exec-path) output in front. 569 (merge 1073094f30 ak/sh-setup-dot-source-i18n-fix later to maint). 570 571 * Fix for a racy false-positive test failure. 572 (merge fdf4f6c79b as/merge-attr-sleep later to maint). 573 574 * Portability update and workaround for builds on recent Mac OS X. 575 (merge a296bc0132 ls/macos-update later to maint). 576 577 * Other minor doc, test and build updates and code cleanups. 578 (merge 5c238e29a8 jk/common-main later to maint). 579 (merge 5a5749e45b ak/pre-receive-hook-template-modefix later to maint). 580 (merge 6d834ac8f1 jk/rebase-config-insn-fmt-docfix later to maint). 581 (merge de9f7fa3b0 rs/commit-pptr-simplify later to maint). 582 (merge 4259d693fc sc/fmt-merge-msg-doc-markup-fix later to maint). 583 (merge 28fab7b23d nd/test-helpers later to maint). 584 (merge c2bb0c1d1e rs/cocci later to maint). 585 (merge 3285b7badb ps/common-info-doc later to maint). 586 (merge 2b090822e8 nd/worktree-lock later to maint). 587 (merge 4bd488ea7c jk/create-branch-remove-unused-param later to maint). 588 (merge 974e0044d6 tk/diffcore-delta-remove-unused later to maint).