Documentation / RelNotes / 2.12.0.txton commit Merge branch 'ad/bisect-terms' (e945770)
   1Git 2.12 Release Notes
   2======================
   3
   4Backward compatibility notes.
   5
   6 * Use of an empty string that is used for 'everything matches' is
   7   still warned and Git asks users to use a more explicit '.' for that
   8   instead.  The hope is that existing users will not mind this
   9   change, and eventually the warning can be turned into a hard error,
  10   upgrading the deprecation into removal of this (mis)feature.  That
  11   is not scheduled to happen in the upcoming release (yet).
  12
  13 * The historical argument order "git merge <msg> HEAD <commit>..."
  14   has been deprecated for quite some time, and will be removed in the
  15   upcoming release.
  16
  17
  18Updates since v2.11
  19-------------------
  20
  21UI, Workflows & Features
  22
  23 * Various updates to "git p4".
  24
  25 * "git p4" didn't interact with the internal of .git directory
  26   correctly in the modern "git-worktree"-enabled world.
  27
  28 * "git branch --list" and friends learned "--ignore-case" option to
  29   optionally sort branches and tags case insensitively.
  30
  31 * In addition to %(subject), %(body), "log --pretty=format:..."
  32   learned a new placeholder %(trailers).
  33
  34 * "git rebase" learned "--quit" option, which allows a user to
  35   remove the metadata left by an earlier "git rebase" that was
  36   manually aborted without using "git rebase --abort".
  37
  38 * "git clone --reference $there --recurse-submodules $super" has been
  39   taught to guess repositories usable as references for submodules of
  40   $super that are embedded in $there while making a clone of the
  41   superproject borrow objects from $there; extend the mechanism to
  42   also allow submodules of these submodules to borrow repositories
  43   embedded in these clones of the submodules embedded in the clone of
  44   the superproject.
  45
  46 * Porcelain scripts written in Perl are getting internationalized.
  47
  48 * "git merge --continue" has been added as a synonym to "git commit"
  49   to conclude a merge that has stopped due to conflicts.
  50
  51 * Finer-grained control of what protocols are allowed for transports
  52   during clone/fetch/push have been enabled via a new configuration
  53   mechanism.
  54
  55 * "git shortlog" learned "--committer" option to group commits by
  56   committer, instead of author.
  57
  58 * GitLFS integration with "git p4" has been updated.
  59
  60 * The isatty() emulation for Windows has been updated to eradicate
  61   the previous hack that depended on internals of (older) MSVC
  62   runtime.
  63
  64 * Some platforms no longer understand "latin-1" that is still seen in
  65   the wild in e-mail headers; replace them with "iso-8859-1" that is
  66   more widely known when conversion fails from/to it.
  67   (merge df3755888b jc/latin-1 later to maint).
  68
  69 * "git grep" has been taught to optionally recurse into submodules.
  70
  71 * "git rm" used to refuse to remove a submodule when it has its own
  72   git repository embedded in its working tree.  It learned to move
  73   the repository away to $GIT_DIR/modules/ of the superproject
  74   instead, and allow the submodule to be deleted (as long as there
  75   will be no loss of local modifications, that is).
  76
  77 * A recent updates to "git p4" was not usable for older p4 but it
  78   could be made to work with minimum changes.  Do so.
  79
  80
  81Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.
  82
  83 * Commands that operate on a log message and add lines to the trailer
  84   blocks, such as "format-patch -s", "cherry-pick (-x|-s)", and
  85   "commit -s", have been taught to use the logic of and share the
  86   code with "git interpret-trailer".
  87
  88 * The default Travis-CI configuration specifies newer P4 and GitLFS.
  89
  90 * The "fast hash" that had disastrous performance issues in some
  91   corner cases has been retired from the internal diff.
  92
  93 * The character width table has been updated to match Unicode 9.0
  94
  95 * Update the procedure to generate "tags" for developer support.
  96   (merge 046e4c1c09 jk/make-tags-find-sources-tweak later to maint).
  97
  98 * The codeflow of setting NOATIME and CLOEXEC on file descriptors Git
  99   opens has been simplified.
 100   (merge b4d065df03 jc/git-open-cloexec later to maint).
 101
 102 * "git diff" and its family had two experimental heuristics to shift
 103   the contents of a hunk to make the patch easier to read.  One of
 104   them turns out to be better than the other, so leave only the
 105   "--indent-heuristic" option and remove the other one.
 106   (merge 3cde4e02ee jc/retire-compaction-heuristics later to maint).
 107
 108 * A new submodule helper "git submodule embedgitdirs" to make it
 109   easier to move embedded .git/ directory for submodules in a
 110   superproject to .git/modules/ (and point the latter with the former
 111   that is turned into a "gitdir:" file) has been added.
 112
 113 * "git push \\server\share\dir" has recently regressed and then
 114   fixed.  A test has retroactively been added for this breakage.
 115
 116 * Build updates for Cygwin.
 117
 118 * The implementation of "real_path()" was to go there with chdir(2)
 119   and call getcwd(3), but this obviously wouldn't be usable in a
 120   threaded environment.  Rewrite it to manually resolve relative
 121   paths including symbolic links in path components.
 122
 123 * Adjust documentation to help AsciiDoctor render better while not
 124   breaking the rendering done by AsciiDoc.
 125
 126
 127Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
 128
 129Fixes since v2.10
 130-----------------
 131
 132Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.9 in the maintenance
 133track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases'
 134notes for details).
 135
 136 * We often decide if a session is interactive by checking if the
 137   standard I/O streams are connected to a TTY, but isatty() that
 138   comes with Windows incorrectly returned true if it is used on NUL
 139   (i.e. an equivalent to /dev/null).  This has been fixed.
 140
 141 * "git svn" did not work well with path components that are "0", and
 142   some configuration variable it uses were not documented.
 143   (merge ea9a93dcc2 ew/svn-fixes later to maint).
 144
 145 * "git rev-parse --symbolic" failed with a more recent notation like
 146   "HEAD^-1" and "HEAD^!".
 147
 148 * An empty directory in a working tree that can simply be nuked used
 149   to interfere while merging or cherry-picking a change to create a
 150   submodule directory there, which has been fixed..
 151
 152 * The code in "git push" to compute if any commit being pushed in the
 153   superproject binds a commit in a submodule that hasn't been pushed
 154   out was overly inefficient, making it unusable even for a small
 155   project that does not have any submodule but have a reasonable
 156   number of refs.
 157
 158 * "git push --dry-run --recurse-submodule=on-demand" wasn't
 159   "--dry-run" in the submodules.
 160
 161 * The output from "git worktree list" was made in readdir() order,
 162   and was unstable.
 163
 164 * mergetool.<tool>.trustExitCode configuration variable did not apply
 165   to built-in tools, but now it does.
 166
 167 * "git p4" LFS support was broken when LFS stores an empty blob.
 168
 169 * A corner case in merge-recursive regression that crept in
 170   during 2.10 development cycle has been fixed.
 171
 172 * Transport with dumb http can be fooled into following foreign URLs
 173   that the end user does not intend to, especially with the server
 174   side redirects and http-alternates mechanism, which can lead to
 175   security issues.  Tighten the redirection and make it more obvious
 176   to the end user when it happens.
 177
 178 * Update the error messages from the dumb-http client when it fails
 179   to obtain loose objects; we used to give sensible error message
 180   only upon 404 but we now forbid unexpected redirects that needs to
 181   be reported with something sensible.
 182
 183 * When diff.renames configuration is on (and with Git 2.9 and later,
 184   it is enabled by default, which made it worse), "git stash"
 185   misbehaved if a file is removed and another file with a very
 186   similar content is added.
 187
 188 * "git diff --no-index" did not take "--no-abbrev" option.
 189
 190 * "git difftool --dir-diff" had a minor regression when started from
 191   a subdirectory, which has been fixed.
 192
 193 * "git commit --allow-empty --only" (no pathspec) with dirty index
 194   ought to be an acceptable way to create a new commit that does not
 195   change any paths, but it was forbidden, perhaps because nobody
 196   needed it so far.
 197
 198 * Git 2.11 had a minor regression in "merge --ff-only" that competed
 199   with another process that simultanously attempted to update the
 200   index. We used to explain what went wrong with an error message,
 201   but the new code silently failed.  The error message has been
 202   resurrected.
 203
 204 * A pathname that begins with "//" or "\\" on Windows is special but
 205   path normalization logic was unaware of it.
 206
 207 * "git pull --rebase", when there is no new commits on our side since
 208   we forked from the upstream, should be able to fast-forward without
 209   invoking "git rebase", but it didn't.
 210
 211 * The way to specify hotkeys to "xxdiff" that is used by "git
 212   mergetool" has been modernized to match recent versions of xxdiff.
 213
 214 * Unlike "git am --abort", "git cherry-pick --abort" moved HEAD back
 215   to where cherry-pick started while picking multiple changes, when
 216   the cherry-pick stopped to ask for help from the user, and the user
 217   did "git reset --hard" to a different commit in order to re-attempt
 218   the operation.
 219
 220 * Code cleanup in shallow boundary computation.
 221
 222 * A recent update to receive-pack to make it easier to drop garbage
 223   objects made it clear that GIT_ALTERNATE_OBJECT_DIRECTORIES cannot
 224   have a pathname with a colon in it (no surprise!), and this in turn
 225   made it impossible to push into a repository at such a path.  This
 226   has been fixed by introducing a quoting mechanism used when
 227   appending such a path to the colon-separated list.
 228
 229 * The function usage_msg_opt() has been updated to say "fatal:"
 230   before the custom message programs give, when they want to die
 231   with a message about wrong command line options followed by the
 232   standard usage string.
 233
 234 * "git index-pack --stdin" needs an access to an existing repository,
 235   but "git index-pack file.pack" to generate an .idx file that
 236   corresponds to a packfile does not.
 237
 238 * Fix for NDEBUG builds.
 239
 240 * A lazy "git push" without refspec did not internally use a fully
 241   specified refspec to perform 'current', 'simple', or 'upstream'
 242   push, causing unnecessary "ambiguous ref" errors.
 243
 244 * "git p4" misbehaved when swapping a directory and a symbolic link.
 245
 246 * Even though an fix was attempted in Git 2.9.3 days, but running
 247   "git difftool --dir-diff" from a subdirectory never worked. This
 248   has been fixed.
 249
 250 * "git p4" that tracks multile p4 paths imported a single changelist
 251   that touches files in these multiple paths as one commit, followed
 252   by many empty commits.  This has been fixed.
 253
 254 * A potential but unlikely buffer overflow in Windows port has been
 255   fixed.
 256
 257 * When the http server gives an incomplete response to a smart-http
 258   rpc call, it could lead to client waiting for a full response that
 259   will never come.  Teach the client side to notice this condition
 260   and abort the transfer.
 261
 262 * Compression setting for producing packfiles were spread across
 263   three codepaths, one of which did not honor any configuration.
 264   Unify these so that all of them honor core.compression and
 265   pack.compression variables the same way.
 266   (merge 8de7eeb54b jc/compression-config later to maint).
 267
 268 * "git fast-import" sometimes mishandled while rebalancing notes
 269   tree, which has been fixed.
 270   (merge 405d7f4af6 mh/fast-import-notes-fix-new later to maint).
 271
 272 * Recent update to the default abbreviation length that auto-scales
 273   lacked documentation update, which has been corrected.
 274   (merge 48d5014dd4 jc/abbrev-autoscale-config later to maint).
 275
 276 * Leakage of lockfiles in the config subsystem has been fixed.
 277   (merge c06fa62dfc nd/config-misc-fixes later to maint).
 278
 279 * It is natural that "git gc --auto" may not attempt to pack
 280   everything into a single pack, and there is no point in warning
 281   when the user has configured the system to use the pack bitmap,
 282   leading to disabling further "gc".
 283   (merge 1c409a705c dt/disable-bitmap-in-auto-gc later to maint).
 284
 285 * "git archive" did not read the standard configuration files, and
 286   failed to notice a file that is marked as binary via the userdiff
 287   driver configuration.
 288   (merge 965cba2e7e jk/archive-zip-userdiff-config later to maint).
 289
 290 * "git blame --porcelain" misidentified the "previous" <commit, path>
 291   pair (aka "source") when contents came from two or more files.
 292   (merge 4e76832984 jk/blame-fixes later to maint).
 293
 294 * "git rebase -i" with a recent update started showing an incorrect
 295   count when squashing more than 10 commits.
 296   (merge 356b8ecff1 jk/rebase-i-squash-count-fix later to maint).
 297
 298 * "git <cmd> @{push}" on a detached HEAD used to segfault; it has
 299   been corrected to error out with a message.
 300   (merge b10731f43d km/branch-get-push-while-detached later to maint).
 301
 302 * Running "git add a/b" when "a" is a submodule correctly errored
 303   out, but without a meaningful error message.
 304   (merge 2d81c48fa7 sb/pathspec-errors later to maint).
 305
 306 * Typing ^C to pager, which usually does not kill it, killed Git and
 307   took the pager down as a collateral damage in certain process-tree
 308   structure.  This has been fixed.
 309   (merge 46df6906f3 jk/execv-dashed-external later to maint).
 310
 311 * "git mergetool" without any pathspec on the command line that is
 312   run from a subdirectory became no-op in Git v2.11 by mistake, which
 313   has been fixed.
 314
 315 * Retire long unused/unmaintained gitview from the contrib/ area.
 316   (merge 3120925c25 sb/remove-gitview later to maint).
 317
 318 * Other minor doc, test and build updates and code cleanups.
 319   (merge f2627d9b19 sb/submodule-config-cleanup later to maint).
 320   (merge 384f1a167b sb/unpack-trees-cleanup later to maint).