4 Backward compatibility notes.
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
14 * The historical argument order "git merge <msg> HEAD <commit>..."
15 has been deprecated for quite some time, and will be removed in a
18 * The default location "~/.git-credential-cache/socket" for the
19 socket used to communicate with the credential-cache daemon has
20 been moved to "~/.cache/git/credential/socket".
26 UI, Workflows & Features
28 * "git describe" and "git name-rev" have been taught to take more
29 than one refname patterns to restrict the set of refs to base their
30 naming output on, and also learned to take negative patterns to
31 name refs not to be used for naming via their "--exclude" option.
33 * Deletion of a branch "foo/bar" could remove .git/refs/heads/foo
34 once there no longer is any other branch whose name begins with
35 "foo/", but we didn't do so so far. Now we do.
37 * When "git merge" detects a path that is renamed in one history
38 while the other history deleted (or modified) it, it now reports
39 both paths to help the user understand what is going on in the two
40 histories being merged.
42 * The <url> part in "http.<url>.<variable>" configuration variable
43 can now be spelled with '*' that serves as wildcard.
44 E.g. "http.https://*.example.com.proxy" can be used to specify the
45 proxy used for https://a.example.com, https://b.example.com, etc.,
46 i.e. any host in the example.com domain.
48 * "git tag" did not leave useful message when adding a new entry to
49 reflog; this was left unnoticed for a long time because refs/tags/*
50 doesn't keep reflog by default.
52 * The "negative" pathspec feature was somewhat more cumbersome to use
53 than necessary in that its short-hand used "!" which needed to be
54 escaped from shells, and it required "exclude from what?" specified.
56 * The command line options for ssh invocation needs to be tweaked for
57 some implementations of SSH (e.g. PuTTY plink wants "-P <port>"
58 while OpenSSH wants "-p <port>" to specify port to connect to), and
59 the variant was guessed when GIT_SSH environment variable is used
60 to specify it. The logic to guess now applies to the command
61 specified by the newer GIT_SSH_COMMAND and also core.sshcommand
62 configuration variable, and comes with an escape hatch for users to
63 deal with misdetected cases.
65 * The "--git-path", "--git-common-dir", and "--shared-index-path"
66 options of "git rev-parse" did not produce usable output. They are
67 now updated to show the path to the correct file, relative to where
70 * "git diff -W" has been taught to handle the case where a new
71 function is added at the end of the file better.
73 * "git update-ref -d" and other operations to delete references did
74 not leave any entry in HEAD's reflog when the reference being
75 deleted was the current branch. This is not a problem in practice
76 because you do not want to delete the branch you are currently on,
77 but caused renaming of the current branch to something else not to
78 be logged in a useful way.
80 * "Cc:" on the trailer part does not have to conform to RFC strictly,
81 unlike in the e-mail header. "git send-email" has been updated to
82 ignore anything after '>' when picking addresses, to allow non-address
83 cruft like " # stable 4.4" after the address.
85 * When "git submodule init" decides that the submodule in the working
86 tree is its upstream, it now gives a warning as it is not a very
88 (merge d1b3b81aab sb/submodule-init-url-selection later to maint).
90 * "git stash save" takes a pathspec so that the local changes can be
91 stashed away only partially.
92 (merge 9e140909f6 tg/stash-push later to maint).
94 * Documentation for "git ls-files" did not refer to core.quotePath.
96 * The experimental "split index" feature has gained a few
97 configuration variables to make it easier to use.
99 * From a working tree of a repository, a new option of "rev-parse"
100 lets you ask if the repository is used as a submodule of another
101 project, and where the root level of the working tree of that
102 project (i.e. your superproject) is.
104 * The pathspec mechanism learned to further limit the paths that
105 match the pattern to those that have specified attributes attached
106 via the gitattributes mechanism.
108 * Our source code has used the SHA1_HEADER cpp macro after "#include"
109 in the C code to switch among the SHA-1 implementations. Instead,
110 list the exact header file names and switch among implementations
111 using "#ifdef BLK_SHA1/#include "block-sha1/sha1.h"/.../#endif";
112 this helps some IDE tools.
114 * The start-up sequence of "git" needs to figure out some configured
115 settings before it finds and set itself up in the location of the
116 repository and was quite messy due to its "chicken-and-egg" nature.
117 The code has been restructured.
119 * The command line prompt (in contrib/) learned a new 'tag' style
120 that can be specified with GIT_PS1_DESCRIBE_STYLE, to describe a
121 detached HEAD with "git describe --tags".
123 * The configuration file learned a new "includeIf.<condition>.path"
124 that includes the contents of the given path only when the
125 condition holds. This allows you to say "include this work-related
126 bit only in the repositories under my ~/work/ directory".
128 * Recent update to "rebase -i" started showing a message that is not
129 a warning with "warning:" prefix by mistake. This has been fixed.
131 * Recently we started passing the "--push-options" through the
132 external remote helper interface; now the "smart HTTP" remote
133 helper understands what to do with the passed information.
135 * "git describe --dirty" dies when it cannot be determined if the
136 state in the working tree matches that of HEAD (e.g. broken
137 repository or broken submodule). The command learned a new option
138 "git describe --broken" to give "$name-broken" (where $name is the
139 description of HEAD) in such a case.
142 Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.
144 * The code to list branches in "git branch" has been consolidated
145 with the more generic ref-filter API.
147 * Resource usage while enumerating refs from alternate object store
148 has been optimized to help receiving end of "push" that hosts a
149 repository with many "forks".
151 * The gitattributes machinery is being taught to work better in a
152 multi-threaded environment.
154 * "git rebase -i" starts using the recently updated "sequencer" code.
156 * Code and design clean-up for the refs API.
158 * The preload-index code has been taught not to bother with the index
159 entries that are paths that are not checked out by "sparse checkout".
161 * Some warning() messages from "git clean" were updated to show the
162 errno from failed system calls.
164 * The "parse_config_key()" API function has been cleaned up.
165 (merge ad8c7cdadd jk/parse-config-key-cleanup later to maint).
167 * A test that creates a confusing branch whose name is HEAD has been
168 corrected not to do so.
170 * The code that parses header fields in the commit object has been
171 updated for (micro)performance and code hygiene.
173 * An helper function to make it easier to append the result from
174 real_path() to a strbuf has been added.
175 (merge 33ad9ddd0b rs/strbuf-add-real-path later to maint).
177 * Reduce authentication round-trip over HTTP when the server supports
178 just a single authentication method. This also improves the
179 behaviour when Git is misconfigured to enable http.emptyAuth
180 against a server that does not authenticate without a username
181 (i.e. not using Kerberos etc., which makes http.emptyAuth
184 * Windows port wants to use OpenSSL's implementation of SHA-1
185 routines, so let them.
187 * The t/perf performance test suite was not prepared to test not so
188 old versions of Git, but now it covers versions of Git that are not
190 (merge 28e1fb5466 jt/perf-updates later to maint).
192 * Add 32-bit Linux variant to the set of platforms to be tested with
195 * "git branch --list" takes the "--abbrev" and "--no-abbrev" options
196 to control the output of the object name in its "-v"(erbose)
197 output, but a recent update started ignoring them; fix it before
198 the breakage reaches to any released version.
200 * Picking two versions of Git and running tests to make sure the
201 older one and the newer one interoperate happily has now become
203 (merge bd4d9d993c jk/interop-test later to maint).
205 * "uchar [40]" to "struct object_id" conversion continues.
207 * "git tag --contains" used to (ab)use the object bits to keep track
208 of the state of object reachability without clearing them after
209 use; this has been cleaned up and made to use the newer commit-slab
212 * The "debug" helper used in the test framework learned to run
213 a command under "gdb" interactively.
214 (merge 59210dd56c sg/test-with-stdin later to maint).
216 * The "detect attempt to create collisions" variant of SHA-1
217 implementation by Marc Stevens (CWI) and Dan Shumow (Microsoft)
218 has been integrated and made the default.
220 * The test framework learned to detect unterminated here documents.
223 Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
229 Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.12 in the maintenance
230 track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases'
233 * "git repack --depth=<n>" for a long time busted the specified depth
234 when reusing delta from existing packs. This has been corrected.
235 (merge 42b766d765 jk/delta-chain-limit later to maint).
237 * The code to parse the command line "git grep <patterns>... <rev>
238 [[--] <pathspec>...]" has been cleaned up, and a handful of bugs
239 have been fixed (e.g. we used to check "--" if it is a rev).
241 * "git ls-remote" and "git archive --remote" are designed to work
242 without being in a directory under Git's control. However, recent
243 updates revealed that we randomly look into a directory called
244 .git/ without actually doing necessary set-up when working in a
245 repository. Stop doing so.
247 * "git show-branch" expected there were only very short branch names
248 in the repository and used a fixed-length buffer to hold them
249 without checking for overflow.
251 * A caller of tempfile API that uses stdio interface to write to
252 files may ignore errors while writing, which is detected when
253 tempfile is closed (with a call to ferror()). By that time, the
254 original errno that may have told us what went wrong is likely to
255 be long gone and was overwritten by an irrelevant value.
256 close_tempfile() now resets errno to EIO to make errno at least
259 * "git remote rm X", when a branch has remote X configured as the
260 value of its branch.*.remote, tried to remove branch.*.remote and
261 branch.*.merge and failed if either is unset.
263 * A "gc.log" file left by a backgrounded "gc --auto" disables further
264 automatic gc; it has been taught to run at least once a day (by
265 default) by ignoring a stale "gc.log" file that is too old.
267 * The code to parse "git -c VAR=VAL cmd" and set configuration
268 variable for the duration of cmd had two small bugs, which have
271 * user.email that consists of only cruft chars should consistently
272 error out, but didn't.
273 (merge 94425552f3 jk/ident-empty later to maint).
275 * "git upload-pack", which is a counter-part of "git fetch", did not
276 report a request for a ref that was not advertised as invalid.
277 This is generally not a problem (because "git fetch" will stop
278 before making such a request), but is the right thing to do.
280 * A leak in a codepath to read from a packed object in (rare) cases
283 * When a redirected http transport gets an error during the
284 redirected request, we ignored the error we got from the server,
285 and ended up giving a not-so-useful error message.
287 * The patch subcommand of "git add -i" was meant to have paths
288 selection prompt just like other subcommand, unlike "git add -p"
289 directly jumps to hunk selection. Recently, this was broken and
290 "add -i" lost the paths selection dialog, but it now has been
293 * Git v2.12 was shipped with an embarrassing breakage where various
294 operations that verify paths given from the user stopped dying when
295 seeing an issue, and instead later triggering segfault.
297 * There is no need for Python only to give a few messages to the
298 standard error stream, but we somehow did.
300 * The code to parse "git log -L..." command line was buggy when there
301 are many ranges specified with -L; overrun of the allocated buffer
304 * The command-line parsing of "git log -L" copied internal data
305 structures using incorrect size on ILP32 systems.
307 * "git diff --quiet" relies on the size field in diff_filespec to be
308 correctly populated, but diff_populate_filespec() helper function
309 made an incorrect short-cut when asked only to populate the size
310 field for paths that need to go through convert_to_git() (e.g. CRLF
313 * A few tests were run conditionally under (rare) conditions where
314 they cannot be run (like running cvs tests under 'root' account).
315 (merge c6507484a2 ab/cond-skip-tests later to maint).
317 * "git branch @" created refs/heads/@ as a branch, and in general the
318 code that handled @{-1} and @{upstream} was a bit too loose in
320 (merge fd4692ff70 jk/interpret-branch-name later to maint).
322 * "git fetch" that requests a commit by object name, when the other
323 side does not allow such an request, failed without much
325 (merge d56583ded6 mm/fetch-show-error-message-on-unadvertised-object later to maint).
327 * "git filter-branch --prune-empty" drops a single-parent commit that
328 becomes a no-op, but did not drop a root commit whose tree is empty.
329 (merge 32da7467eb dp/filter-branch-prune-empty later to maint).
331 * Recent versions of Git treats http alternates (used in dumb http
332 transport) just like HTTP redirects and requires the client to
333 enable following it, due to security concerns. But we forgot to
334 give a warning when we decide not to honor the alternates.
335 (merge 5cae73d5d2 ew/http-alternates-as-redirects-warning later to maint).
337 * "git push" had a handful of codepaths that could lead to a deadlock
338 when unexpected error happened, which has been fixed.
340 * "Dumb http" transport used to misparse a nonsense http-alternates
341 response, which has been fixed.
343 * "git add -p <pathspec>" unnecessarily expanded the pathspec to a
344 list of individual files that matches the pathspec by running "git
345 ls-files <pathspec>", before feeding it to "git diff-index" to see
346 which paths have changes, because historically the pathspec
347 language supported by "diff-index" was weaker. These days they are
348 equivalent and there is no reason to internally expand it. This
349 helps both performance and avoids command line argument limit on
351 (merge 7288e12cce jk/add-i-use-pathspecs later to maint).
353 * "git status --porcelain" is supposed to give a stable output, but a
354 few strings were left as translatable by mistake.
356 * "git revert -m 0 $merge_commit" complained that reverting a merge
357 needs to say relative to which parent the reversion needs to
358 happen, as if "-m 0" weren't given. The correct diagnosis is that
359 "-m 0" does not refer to the first parent ("-m 1" does). This has
362 * Code to read submodule.<name>.ignore config did not state the
363 variable name correctly when giving an error message diagnosing
366 * Fix for NO_PTHREADS build.
367 (merge 7b91929ba0 jk/execv-dashed-external later to maint).
369 * Fix for potential segv introduced in v2.11.0 and later (also
370 v2.10.2) to "git log --pickaxe-regex -S".
371 (merge f53c5de29c js/regexec-buf later to maint).
373 * A few unterminated here documents in tests were fixed, which in
374 turn revealed incorrect expectations the tests make. These tests
376 (merge b42ca35e5c st/verify-tag later to maint).
378 * Other minor doc, test and build updates and code cleanups.
379 (merge dfa3ad3238 rs/blame-code-cleanup later to maint).
380 (merge ffddfc6328 jk/rev-parse-cleanup later to maint).
381 (merge f20754802a jk/pack-name-cleanups later to maint).
382 (merge d4aae459cd sb/wt-status-cleanup later to maint).
383 (merge e94eac49e6 rs/http-push-cleanup later to maint).
384 (merge ba6746c08f rs/path-name-safety-cleanup later to maint).
385 (merge d41626ff9e rs/shortlog-cleanup later to maint).
386 (merge dce96c41f9 rs/update-hook-optim later to maint).
387 (merge 37e61153e2 jk/quote-env-path-list-component later to maint).
388 (merge a4dded0189 sb/submodule-update-initial-runs-custom-script later to maint).
389 (merge 70471ed9bb sb/t3600-rephrase later to maint).
390 (merge e7e183d6ee km/config-grammofix later to maint).