1Git 2.8 Release Notes 2===================== 3 4Backward compatibility note 5--------------------------- 6 7The rsync:// transport has been removed. 8 9 10Updates since v2.7 11------------------ 12 13UI, Workflows & Features 14 15 * It turns out "git clone" over rsync transport has been broken when 16 the source repository has packed references for a long time, and 17 nobody noticed nor complained about it. 18 19 * "branch --delete" has "branch -d" but "push --delete" does not. 20 21 * "git blame" learned to produce the progress eye-candy when it takes 22 too much time before emitting the first line of the result. 23 24 * "git grep" can now be configured (or told from the command line) 25 how many threads to use when searching in the working tree files. 26 27 * Some "git notes" operations, e.g. "git log --notes=<note>", should 28 be able to read notes from any tree-ish that is shaped like a notes 29 tree, but the notes infrastructure required that the argument must 30 be a ref under refs/notes/. Loosen it to require a valid ref only 31 when the operation would update the notes (in which case we must 32 have a place to store the updated notes tree, iow, a ref). 33 34 * "git grep" by default does not fall back to its "--no-index" 35 behaviour outside a directory under Git's control (otherwise the 36 user may by mistake end up running a huge recursive search); with a 37 new configuration (set in $HOME/.gitconfig--by definition this 38 cannot be set in the config file per project), this safety can be 39 disabled. 40 41 * "git pull --rebase" has been extended to allow invoking 42 "rebase -i". 43 44 * "git p4" learned to cope with the type of a file getting changed. 45 46 * "git format-patch" learned to notice format.outputDirectory 47 configuration variable. This allows "-o <dir>" option to be 48 omitted on the command line if you always use the same directory in 49 your workflow. 50 51 * "interpret-trailers" has been taught to optionally update a file in 52 place, instead of always writing the result to the standard output. 53 54 * Many commands that read files that are expected to contain text 55 that is generated (or can be edited) by the end user to control 56 their behaviour (e.g. "git grep -f <filename>") have been updated 57 to be more tolerant to lines that are terminated with CRLF (they 58 used to treat such a line to contain payload that ends with CR, 59 which is usually not what the users expect). 60 61 * "git notes merge" used to limit the source of the merged notes tree 62 to somewhere under refs/notes/ hierarchy, which was too limiting 63 when inventing a workflow to exchange notes with remote 64 repositories using remote-tracking notes trees (located in e.g. 65 refs/remote-notes/ or somesuch). 66 67 * "git ls-files" learned a new "--eol" option to help diagnose 68 end-of-line problems. 69 70 * "ls-remote" learned an option to show which branch the remote 71 repository advertises as its primary by pointing its HEAD at. 72 73 * New http.proxyAuthMethod configuration variable can be used to 74 specify what authentication method to use, as a way to work around 75 proxies that do not give error response expected by libcurl when 76 CURLAUTH_ANY is used. Also, the codepath for proxy authentication 77 has been taught to use credential API to store the authentication 78 material in user's keyrings. 79 80 * Update the untracked cache subsystem and change its primary UI from 81 "git update-index" to "git config". 82 83 * There were a few "now I am doing this thing" progress messages in 84 the TCP connection code that can be triggered by setting a verbose 85 option internally in the code, but "git fetch -v" and friends never 86 passed the verbose option down to that codepath. 87 88 * Clean/smudge filters defined in a configuration file of lower 89 precedence can now be overridden to be a pass-through no-op by 90 setting the variable to an empty string. 91 92 * A new "<branch>^{/!-<pattern>}" notation can be used to name a 93 commit that is reachable from <branch> that does not match the 94 given <pattern>. 95 96 * The "user.useConfigOnly" configuration variable can be used to 97 force the user to always set user.email & user.name configuration 98 variables, serving as a reminder for those who work on multiple 99 projects and do not want to put these in their $HOME/.gitconfig. 100 101 * "git fetch" and friends that make network connections can now be 102 told to only use ipv4 (or ipv6). 103 104 * Some authentication methods do not need username or password, but 105 libcurl needs some hint that it needs to perform authentication. 106 Supplying an empty username and password string is a valid way to 107 do so, but you can set the http.[<url>.]emptyAuth configuration 108 variable to achieve the same, if you find it cleaner. 109 110 * You can now set http.[<url>.]pinnedpubkey to specify the pinned 111 public key when building with recent enough versions of libcURL. 112 113 * The configuration system has been taught to phrase where it found a 114 bad configuration variable in a better way in its error messages. 115 "git config" learnt a new "--show-origin" option to indicate where 116 the values come from. 117 118 * The "credential-cache" daemon process used to run in whatever 119 directory it happened to start in, but this made umount(2)ing the 120 filesystem that houses the repository harder; now the process 121 chdir()s to the directory that house its own socket on startup. 122 123 * When "git submodule update" did not result in fetching the commit 124 object in the submodule that is referenced by the superproject, the 125 command learned to retry another fetch, specifically asking for 126 that commit that may not be connected to the refs it usually 127 fetches. 128 129 * "git merge-recursive" learned "--no-renames" option to disable its 130 rename detection logic. 131 132 * Across the transition at around Git version 2.0, the user used to 133 get a pretty loud warning when running "git push" without setting 134 push.default configuration variable. We no longer warn, given that 135 the transition is over long time ago. 136 137 * README has been renamed to README.md and its contents got tweaked 138 slightly to make it easier on the eyes. 139 140 141Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc. 142 143 * Add a framework to spawn a group of processes in parallel, and use 144 it to run "git fetch --recurse-submodules" in parallel. 145 146 * A slight update to the Makefile to mark "phoney" targets 147 as such correctly. 148 149 * In-core storage of the reverse index for .pack files (which lets 150 you go from a pack offset to an object name) has been streamlined. 151 152 * d95138e6 (setup: set env $GIT_WORK_TREE when work tree is set, like 153 $GIT_DIR, 2015-06-26) attempted to work around a glitch in alias 154 handling by overwriting GIT_WORK_TREE environment variable to 155 affect subprocesses when set_git_work_tree() gets called, which 156 resulted in a rather unpleasant regression to "clone" and "init". 157 Try to address the same issue by always restoring the environment 158 and respawning the real underlying command when handling alias. 159 160 * The low-level code that is used to create symbolic references has 161 been updated to share more code with the code that deals with 162 normal references. 163 164 * strbuf_getline() and friends have been redefined to make it easier 165 to identify which callsite of (new) strbuf_getline_lf() should 166 allow and silently ignore carriage-return at the end of the line to 167 help users on DOSsy systems. 168 169 * "git shortlog" used to accumulate various pieces of information 170 regardless of what was asked to be shown in the final output. It 171 has been optimized by noticing what need not to be collected 172 (e.g. there is no need to collect the log messages when showing 173 only the number of changes). 174 175 * "git checkout $branch" (and other operations that share the same 176 underlying machinery) has been optimized. 177 178 * Automated tests in Travis CI environment has been optimized by 179 persisting runtime statistics of previous "prove" run, executing 180 tests that take longer before other ones; this reduces the total 181 wallclock time. 182 183 * Test scripts have been updated to remove assumptions that are not 184 portable between Git for POSIX and Git for Windows, or to skip ones 185 with expectations that are not satisfiable on Git for Windows. 186 187 * Some calls to strcpy(3) triggers a false warning from static 188 analysers that are less intelligent than humans, and reducing the 189 number of these false hits helps us notice real issues. A few 190 calls to strcpy(3) in test-path-utils that are already safe has 191 been rewritten to avoid false wanings. 192 193 * Some calls to strcpy(3) triggers a false warning from static 194 analysers that are less intelligent than humans, and reducing the 195 number of these false hits helps us notice real issues. A few 196 calls to strcpy(3) in "git rerere" that are already safe has been 197 rewritten to avoid false wanings. 198 199 * The "name_path" API was an attempt to reduce the need to construct 200 the full path out of a series of path components while walking a 201 tree hierarchy, but over time made less efficient because the path 202 needs to be flattened, e.g. to be compared with another path that 203 is already flat. The API has been removed and its users have been 204 rewritten to simplify the overall code complexity. 205 206 * Help those who debug http(s) part of the system. 207 (merge 0054045 sp/remote-curl-ssl-strerror later to maint). 208 209 * The internal API to interact with "remote.*" configuration 210 variables has been streamlined. 211 212 * The ref-filter's format-parsing code has been refactored, in 213 preparation for "branch --format" and friends. 214 215 * Traditionally, the tests that try commands that work on the 216 contents in the working tree were named with "worktree" in their 217 filenames, but with the recent addition of "git worktree" 218 subcommand, whose tests are also named similarly, it has become 219 harder to tell them apart. The traditional tests have been renamed 220 to use "work-tree" instead in an attempt to differentiate them. 221 (merge 5549029 mg/work-tree-tests later to maint). 222 223 * Many codepaths forget to check return value from git_config_set(); 224 the function is made to die() to make sure we do not proceed when 225 setting a configuration variable failed. 226 (merge 3d18064 ps/config-error later to maint). 227 228 * Handling of errors while writing into our internal asynchronous 229 process has been made more robust, which reduces flakiness in our 230 tests. 231 (merge 43f3afc jk/epipe-in-async later to maint). 232 233 * There is a new DEVELOPER knob that enables many compiler warning 234 options in the Makefile. 235 236 * The way the test scripts configure the Apache web server has been 237 updated to work also for Apache 2.4 running on RedHat derived 238 distros. 239 240 * Out of maintenance gcc on OSX 10.6 fails to compile the code in 241 'master'; work it around by using clang by default on the platform. 242 243 244Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups. 245 246 247Fixes since v2.7 248---------------- 249 250Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.7 in the maintenance 251track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases' 252notes for details). 253 254 * An earlier change in 2.5.x-era broke users' hooks and aliases by 255 exporting GIT_WORK_TREE to point at the root of the working tree, 256 interfering when they tried to use a different working tree without 257 setting GIT_WORK_TREE environment themselves. 258 259 * The "exclude_list" structure has the usual "alloc, nr" pair of 260 fields to be used by ALLOC_GROW(), but clear_exclude_list() forgot 261 to reset 'alloc' to 0 when it cleared 'nr' to discard the managed 262 array. 263 264 * Paths that have been told the index about with "add -N" are not 265 quite yet in the index, but a few commands behaved as if they 266 already are in a harmful way. 267 268 * "git send-email" was confused by escaped quotes stored in the alias 269 files saved by "mutt", which has been corrected. 270 271 * A few unportable C construct have been spotted by clang compiler 272 and have been fixed. 273 274 * The documentation has been updated to hint the connection between 275 the '--signoff' option and DCO. 276 277 * "git reflog" incorrectly assumed that all objects that used to be 278 at the tip of a ref must be commits, which caused it to segfault. 279 280 * The ignore mechanism saw a few regressions around untracked file 281 listing and sparse checkout selection areas in 2.7.0; the change 282 that is responsible for the regression has been reverted. 283 284 * Some codepaths used fopen(3) when opening a fixed path in $GIT_DIR 285 (e.g. COMMIT_EDITMSG) that is meant to be left after the command is 286 done. This however did not work well if the repository is set to 287 be shared with core.sharedRepository and the umask of the previous 288 user is tighter. They have been made to work better by calling 289 unlink(2) and retrying after fopen(3) fails with EPERM. 290 291 * Asking gitweb for a nonexistent commit left a warning in the server 292 log. 293 294 Somebody may want to follow this up with an additional test, perhaps? 295 IIRC, we do test that no Perl warnings are given to the server log, 296 so this should have been caught if our test coverage were good. 297 298 * "git rebase", unlike all other callers of "gc --auto", did not 299 ignore the exit code from "gc --auto". 300 301 * Many codepaths that run "gc --auto" before exiting kept packfiles 302 mapped and left the file descriptors to them open, which was not 303 friendly to systems that cannot remove files that are open. They 304 now close the packs before doing so. 305 306 * A recent optimization to filter-branch in v2.7.0 introduced a 307 regression when --prune-empty filter is used, which has been 308 corrected. 309 310 * The description for SANITY prerequisite the test suite uses has 311 been clarified both in the comment and in the implementation. 312 313 * "git tag" started listing a tag "foo" as "tags/foo" when a branch 314 named "foo" exists in the same repository; remove this unnecessary 315 disambiguation, which is a regression introduced in v2.7.0. 316 317 * The way "git svn" uses auth parameter was broken by Subversion 318 1.9.0 and later. 319 320 * The "split" subcommand of "git subtree" (in contrib/) incorrectly 321 skipped merges when it shouldn't, which was corrected. 322 323 * A few options of "git diff" did not work well when the command was 324 run from a subdirectory. 325 326 * The command line completion learned a handful of additional options 327 and command specific syntax. 328 329 * dirname() emulation has been added, as Msys2 lacks it. 330 331 * The underlying machinery used by "ls-files -o" and other commands 332 have been taught not to create empty submodule ref cache for a 333 directory that is not a submodule. This removes a ton of wasted 334 CPU cycles. 335 336 * "git worktree" had a broken code that attempted to auto-fix 337 possible inconsistency that results from end-users moving a 338 worktree to different places without telling Git (the original 339 repository needs to maintain backpointers to its worktrees, but 340 "mv" run by end-users who are not familiar with that fact will 341 obviously not adjust them), which actually made things worse 342 when triggered. 343 344 * The low-level merge machinery has been taught to use CRLF line 345 termination when inserting conflict markers to merged contents that 346 are themselves CRLF line-terminated. 347 348 * "git push --force-with-lease" has been taught to report if the push 349 needed to force (or fast-forwarded). 350 351 * The emulated "yes" command used in our test scripts has been 352 tweaked not to spend too much time generating unnecessary output 353 that is not used, to help those who test on Windows where it would 354 not stop until it fills the pipe buffer due to lack of SIGPIPE. 355 356 * The documentation for "git clean" has been corrected; it mentioned 357 that .git/modules/* are removed by giving two "-f", which has never 358 been the case. 359 360 * The vimdiff backend for "git mergetool" has been tweaked to arrange 361 and number buffers in the order that would match the expectation of 362 majority of people who read left to right, then top down and assign 363 buffers 1 2 3 4 "mentally" to local base remote merge windows based 364 on that order. 365 366 * "git show 'HEAD:Foo[BAR]Baz'" did not interpret the argument as a 367 rev, i.e. the object named by the the pathname with wildcard 368 characters in a tree object. 369 (merge aac4fac nd/dwim-wildcards-as-pathspecs later to maint). 370 371 * "git rev-parse --git-common-dir" used in the worktree feature 372 misbehaved when run from a subdirectory. 373 (merge 17f1365 nd/git-common-dir-fix later to maint). 374 375 * Another try to add support to the ignore mechanism that lets you 376 say "this is excluded" and then later say "oh, no, this part (that 377 is a subset of the previous part) is not excluded". 378 379 * "git worktree add -B <branchname>" did not work. 380 381 * The "v(iew)" subcommand of the interactive "git am -i" command was 382 broken in 2.6.0 timeframe when the command was rewritten in C. 383 (merge 708b8cc jc/am-i-v-fix later to maint). 384 385 * "git merge-tree" used to mishandle "both sides added" conflict with 386 its own "create a fake ancestor file that has the common parts of 387 what both sides have added and do a 3-way merge" logic; this has 388 been updated to use the usual "3-way merge with an empty blob as 389 the fake common ancestor file" approach used in the rest of the 390 system. 391 (merge 907681e jk/no-diff-emit-common later to maint). 392 393 * The memory ownership rule of fill_textconv() API, which was a bit 394 tricky, has been documented a bit better. 395 (merge a64e6a4 jk/more-comments-on-textconv later to maint). 396 397 * Update various codepaths to avoid manually-counted malloc(). 398 (merge 08c95df jk/tighten-alloc later to maint). 399 400 * The documentation did not clearly state that the 'simple' mode is 401 now the default for "git push" when push.default configuration is 402 not set. 403 (merge f6b1fb3 mm/push-simple-doc later to maint). 404 405 * Recent versions of GNU grep are pickier when their input contains 406 arbitrary binary data, which some of our tests uses. Rewrite the 407 tests to sidestep the problem. 408 (merge 3b1442d jk/grep-binary-workaround-in-test later to maint). 409 410 * A helper function "git submodule" uses since v2.7.0 to list the 411 modules that match the pathspec argument given to its subcommands 412 (e.g. "submodule add <repo> <path>") has been fixed. 413 (merge 2b56bb7 sb/submodule-module-list-fix later to maint). 414 415 * "git config section.var value" to set a value in per-repository 416 configuration file failed when it was run outside any repository, 417 but didn't say the reason correctly. 418 (merge 638fa62 js/config-set-in-non-repository later to maint). 419 420 * The code to read the pack data using the offsets stored in the pack 421 idx file has been made more carefully check the validity of the 422 data in the idx. 423 (merge 7465feb jk/pack-idx-corruption-safety later to maint). 424 425 * Other minor clean-ups and documentation updates 426 (merge f459823 ak/extract-argv0-last-dir-sep later to maint). 427 (merge 63ca1c0 ak/git-strip-extension-from-dashed-command later to maint). 428 (merge 4867f11 ps/plug-xdl-merge-leak later to maint). 429 (merge 4938686 dt/initial-ref-xn-commit-doc later to maint). 430 (merge 9537f21 ma/update-hooks-sample-typofix later to maint).