Documentation / RelNotes / 2.14.0.txton commit Merge branch 'sb/submodule-rm-absorb' (d04787e)
   1Git 2.14 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 * Git now avoids blindly falling back to ".git" when the setup
  15   sequence said we are _not_ in Git repository.  A corner case that
  16   happens to work right now may be broken by a call to die("BUG").
  17   We've tried hard to locate such cases and fixed them, but there
  18   might still be cases that need to be addressed--bug reports are
  19   greatly appreciated.
  20
  21 * The experiment to improve the hunk-boundary selection of textual
  22   diff output has finished, and the "indent heuristics" has now
  23   become the default.
  24
  25
  26Updates since v2.13
  27-------------------
  28
  29UI, Workflows & Features
  30
  31 * The colors in which "git status --short --branch" showed the names
  32   of the current branch and its remote-tracking branch are now
  33   configurable.
  34
  35 * "git clone" learned the "--no-tags" option not to fetch all tags
  36   initially, and also set up the tagopt not to follow any tags in
  37   subsequent fetches.
  38
  39 * "git archive --format=zip" learned to use zip64 extension when
  40   necessary to go beyond the 4GB limit.
  41   (merge 867e40ff3a rs/large-zip later to maint).
  42
  43 * "git reset" learned "--recurse-submodules" option.
  44
  45 * "git diff --submodule=diff" now recurses into nested submodules.
  46   (merge 5a5221427c jk/diff-submodule-diff-inline later to maint).
  47
  48 * "git repack" learned to accept the --threads=<n> option and pass it
  49   to pack-objects.
  50
  51 * "git send-email" learned to run sendemail-validate hook to inspect
  52   and reject a message before sending it out.
  53   (merge 177409e589 jt/send-email-validate-hook later to maint).
  54
  55 * There is no good reason why "git fetch $there $sha1" should fail
  56   when the $sha1 names an object at the tip of an advertised ref,
  57   even when the other side hasn't enabled allowTipSHA1InWant.
  58
  59 * The recently introduced "[includeIf "gitdir:$dir"] path=..."
  60   mechansim has further been taught to take symlinks into account.
  61   The directory "$dir" specified in "gitdir:$dir" may be a symlink to
  62   a real location, not something that $(getcwd) may return.  In such
  63   a case, a realpath of "$dir" is compared with the real path of the
  64   current repository to determine if the contents from the named path
  65   should be included.
  66
  67 * Make the "indent" heuristics the default in "diff" and diff.indentHeuristics
  68   configuration variable an escape hatch for those who do no want it.
  69
  70 * Many commands learned to pay attention to submodule.recurse
  71   configuration.
  72
  73
  74Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.
  75
  76 * The default packed-git limit value has been raised on larger
  77   platforms to save "git fetch" from a (recoverable) failure while
  78   "gc" is running in parallel.
  79
  80 * Code to update the cache-tree has been tightened so that we won't
  81   accidentally write out any 0{40} entry in the tree object.
  82   (merge a96d3cc3f6 jk/no-null-sha1-in-cache-tree later to maint).
  83
  84 * Attempt to allow us notice "fishy" situation where we fail to
  85   remove the temporary directory used during the test.
  86
  87 * Travis CI gained a task to format the documentation with both
  88   AsciiDoc and AsciiDoctor.
  89
  90 * Some platforms have ulong that is smaller than time_t, and our
  91   historical use of ulong for timestamp would mean they cannot
  92   represent some timestamp that the platform allows.  Invent a
  93   separate and dedicated timestamp_t (so that we can distingiuish
  94   timestamps and a vanilla ulongs, which along is already a good
  95   move), and then declare uintmax_t is the type to be used as the
  96   timestamp_t.
  97
  98 * We can trigger Windows auto-build tester (credits: Dscho &
  99   Microsoft) from our existing Travis CI tester now.
 100
 101 * Conversion from uchar[20] to struct object_id continues.
 102
 103 * Simplify parse_pathspec() codepath and stop it from looking at the
 104   default in-core index.
 105   (merge 08de9151a8 bw/pathspec-sans-the-index later to maint).
 106
 107 * Add perf-test for wildmatch.
 108   (merge 62ca75a6b9 ab/perf-wildmatch later to maint).
 109
 110 * Code from "conversion using external process" codepath has been
 111   extracted to a separate sub-process.[ch] module.
 112   (merge 4f2a2e9f0e bp/sub-process-convert-filter later to maint).
 113
 114 * When "git checkout", "git merge", etc. manipulates the in-core
 115   index, various pieces of information in the index extensions are
 116   discarded from the original state, as it is usually not the case
 117   that they are kept up-to-date and in-sync with the operation on the
 118   main index.  The untracked cache extension is copied across these
 119   operations now, which would speed up "git status" (as long as the
 120   cache is properly invalidated).
 121
 122 * The internal implementation of "git grep" has seen some clean-up.
 123   (merge 8df4c2953f ab/grep-preparatory-cleanup later to maint).
 124
 125 * Update the C style recommendation for notes for translators, as
 126   recent versions of gettext tools can work with our style of
 127   multi-line comments.
 128
 129 * The implementation of "ref" API around the "packed refs" have been
 130   cleaned up, in preparation for further changes.
 131
 132 * The internal logic used in "git blame" has been libified to make it
 133   easier to use by cgit.
 134
 135 * Our code often opens a path to an optional file, to work on its
 136   contents when we can successfully open it.  We can ignore a failure
 137   to open if such an optional file does not exist, but we do want to
 138   report a failure in opening for other reasons (e.g. we got an I/O
 139   error, or the file is there, but we lack the permission to open).
 140
 141   The exact errors we need to ignore are ENOENT (obviously) and
 142   ENOTDIR (less obvious).  Instead of repeating comparison of errno
 143   with these two constants, introduce a helper function to do so.
 144
 145 * We often try to open a file for reading whose existence is
 146   optional, and silently ignore errors from open/fopen; report such
 147   errors if they are not due to missing files.
 148
 149
 150Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
 151
 152
 153Fixes since v2.13
 154-----------------
 155
 156Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.13 in the maintenance
 157track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases'
 158notes for details).
 159
 160 * "git gc" did not interact well with "git worktree"-managed
 161   per-worktree refs.
 162
 163 * "git cherry-pick" and other uses of the sequencer machinery
 164   mishandled a trailer block whose last line is an incomplete line.
 165   This has been fixed so that an additional sign-off etc. are added
 166   after completing the existing incomplete line.
 167
 168 * The codepath in "git am" that is used when running "git rebase"
 169   leaked memory held for the log message of the commits being rebased.
 170
 171 * "git clone --config var=val" is a way to populate the
 172   per-repository configuration file of the new repository, but it did
 173   not work well when val is an empty string.  This has been fixed.
 174
 175 * Setting "log.decorate=false" in the configuration file did not take
 176   effect in v2.13, which has been corrected.
 177
 178 * A few codepaths in "checkout" and "am" working on an unborn branch
 179   tried to access an uninitialized piece of memory.
 180
 181 * The Web interface to gmane news archive is long gone, even though
 182   the articles are still accessible via NTTP.  Replace the links with
 183   ones to public-inbox.org.  Because their message identification is
 184   based on the actual message-id, it is likely that it will be easier
 185   to migrate away from it if/when necessary.
 186
 187 * The receive-pack program now makes sure that the push certificate
 188   records the same set of push options used for pushing.
 189
 190 * Tests have been updated to pass under GETTEXT_POISON (a mechanism
 191   to ensure that output strings that should not be translated are
 192   not translated by mistake), and TravisCI is told to run them.
 193
 194 * "git checkout --recurse-submodules" did not quite work with a
 195   submodule that itself has submodules.
 196
 197 * Plug some leaks and updates internal API used to implement the
 198   split index feature to make it easier to avoid such a leak in the
 199   future.
 200   (merge de950c5773 nd/split-index-unshare later to maint).
 201
 202 * "pack-objects" can stream a slice of an existing packfile out when
 203   the pack bitmap can tell that the reachable objects are all needed
 204   in the output, without inspecting individual objects.  This
 205   strategy however would not work well when "--local" and other
 206   options are in use, and need to be disabled.
 207
 208 * Fix memory leaks pointed out by Coverity (and people).
 209
 210 * "git read-tree -m" (no tree-ish) gave a nonsense suggestion "use
 211   --empty if you want to clear the index".  With "-m", such a request
 212   will still fail anyway, as you'd need to name at least one tree-ish
 213   to be merged.
 214
 215 * Make sure our tests would pass when the sources are checked out
 216   with "platform native" line ending convention by default on
 217   Windows.  Some "text" files out tests use and the test scripts
 218   themselves that are meant to be run with /bin/sh, ought to be
 219   checked out with eol=LF even on Windows.
 220
 221 * Introduce the BUG() macro to improve die("BUG: ...").
 222
 223 * Clarify documentation for include.path and includeIf.<condition>.path
 224   configuration variables.
 225
 226 * Git sometimes gives an advice in a rhetorical question that does
 227   not require an answer, which can confuse new users and non native
 228   speakers.  Attempt to rephrase them.
 229
 230 * A few http:// links that are redirected to https:// in the
 231   documentation have been updated to https:// links.
 232
 233 * "git for-each-ref --format=..." with %(HEAD) in the format used to
 234   resolve the HEAD symref as many times as it had processed refs,
 235   which was wasteful, and "git branch" shared the same problem.
 236
 237 * Regression fix to topic recently merged to 'master'.
 238
 239 * The shell completion script (in contrib/) learned "git stash" has
 240   a new "push" subcommand.
 241
 242 * "git interpret-trailers", when used as GIT_EDITOR for "git commit
 243   -v", looked for and appended to a trailer block at the very end,
 244   i.e. at the end of the "diff" output.  The command has been
 245   corrected to pay attention to the cut-mark line "commit -v" adds to
 246   the buffer---the real trailer block should appear just before it.
 247
 248 * A test allowed both "git push" and "git receive-pack" on the other
 249   end write their traces into the same file.  This is OK on platforms
 250   that allows atomically appending to a file opened with O_APPEND,
 251   but on other platforms led to a mangled output, causing
 252   intermittent test failures.  This has been fixed by disabling
 253   traces from "receive-pack" in the test.
 254
 255 * Tag objects, which are not reachable from any ref, that point at
 256   missing objects were mishandled by "git gc" and friends (they
 257   should silently be ignored instead)
 258
 259 * "git describe --contains" penalized light-weight tags so much that
 260   they were almost never considered.  Instead, give them about the
 261   same chance to be considered as an annotated tag that is the same
 262   age as the underlying commit would.
 263   (merge ef1e74065c jc/name-rev-lw-tag later to maint).
 264
 265 * The "run-command" API implementation has been made more robust
 266   against dead-locking in a threaded environment.
 267
 268 * A recent update to t5545-push-options.sh started skipping all the
 269   tests in the script when a web server testing is disabled or
 270   unavailable, not just the ones that require a web server.  Non HTTP
 271   tests have been salvaged to always run in this script.
 272
 273 * "git send-email" now uses Net::SMTP::SSL, which is obsolete, only
 274   when needed.  Recent versions of Net::SMTP can do TLS natively.
 275
 276 * "foo\bar\baz" in "git fetch foo\bar\baz", even though there is no
 277   slashes in it, cannot be a nickname for a remote on Windows, as
 278   that is likely to be a pathname on a local filesystem.
 279
 280 * "git clean -d" used to clean directories that has ignored files,
 281   even though the command should not lose ignored ones without "-x".
 282   "git status --ignored"  did not list ignored and untracked files
 283   without "-uall".  These have been corrected.
 284
 285 * The result from "git diff" that compares two blobs, e.g. "git diff
 286   $commit1:$path $commit2:$path", used to be shown with the full
 287   object name as given on the command line, but it is more natural to
 288   use the $path in the output and use it to look up .gitattributes.
 289   (merge 30d005c020 jk/diff-blob later to maint).
 290
 291 * The "collision detecting" SHA-1 implementation shipped with 2.13
 292   was quite broken on some big-endian platforms and/or platforms that
 293   do not like unaligned fetches.  Update to the upstream code which
 294   has already fixed these issues.
 295
 296 * "git am -h" triggered a BUG().
 297
 298 * The interaction of "url.*.insteadOf" and custom URL scheme's
 299   whitelisting is now documented better.
 300
 301 * The timestamp of the index file is now taken after the file is
 302   closed, to help Windows, on which a stale timestamp is reported by
 303   fstat() on a file that is opened for writing and data was written
 304   but not yet closed.
 305
 306 * "git pull --rebase --autostash" didn't auto-stash when the local history
 307   fast-forwards to the upstream.
 308
 309 * A flaky test has been corrected.
 310   (merge 7c2115aa07 jk/pack-idx-corruption-safety later to maint).
 311
 312 * Other minor doc, test and build updates and code cleanups.
 313   (merge 8ba74bfd7c jc/diff-tree-stale-comment later to maint).