4 Backward compatibility notes
5 ----------------------------
10 UI, Workflows & Features
12 * "git pull --rebase --verify-signature" learned to warn the user
13 that "--verify-signature" is a no-op when rebasing.
15 * An upstream project can make a recommendation to shallowly clone
16 some submodules in the .gitmodules file it ships.
18 * "git worktree add" learned that '-' can be used as a short-hand for
19 "@{-1}", the previous branch.
21 * Update the funcname definition to support css files.
23 * The completion script (in contrib/) learned to complete "git
26 * Messages that are generated by auto gc during "git push" on the
27 receiving end are now passed back to the sending end in such a way
28 that they are shown with "remote: " prefix to avoid confusing the
31 * "git add -i/-p" learned to honor diff.compactionHeuristic
32 experimental knob, so that the user can work on the same hunk split
35 * "upload-pack" allows a custom "git pack-objects" replacement when
36 responding to "fetch/clone" via the uploadpack.packObjectsHook.
37 (merge b738396 jk/upload-pack-hook later to maint).
39 * Teach format-patch and mailsplit (hence "am") how a line that
40 happens to begin with "From " in the e-mail message is quoted with
41 ">", so that these lines can be restored to their original shape.
42 (merge d9925d1 ew/mboxrd-format-am later to maint).
44 * "git repack" learned the "--keep-unreachable" option, which sends
45 loose unreachable objects to a pack instead of leaving them loose.
46 This helps heuristics based on the number of loose objects
48 (merge e26a8c4 jk/repack-keep-unreachable later to maint).
50 * "log --graph --format=" learned that "%>|(N)" specifies the width
51 relative to the terminal's left edge, not relative to the area to
52 draw text that is to the right of the ancestry-graph section. It
53 also now accepts negative N that means the column limit is relative
56 * A careless invocation of "git send-email directory/" after editing
57 0001-change.patch with an editor often ends up sending both
58 0001-change.patch and its backup file, 0001-change.patch~, causing
59 embarrassment and a minor confusion. Detect such an input and
60 offer to skip the backup files when sending the patches out.
61 (merge 531220b jc/send-email-skip-backup later to maint).
63 * "git submodule update" that drives many "git clone" could
64 eventually hit flaky servers/network conditions on one of the
65 submodules; the command learned to retry the attempt.
67 * The output coloring scheme learned two new attributes, italic and
68 strike, in addition to existing bold, reverse, etc.
70 * "git log" learns log.showSignature configuration variable, and a
71 command line option "--no-show-signature" to countermand it.
72 (merge fce04c3 mj/log-show-signature-conf later to maint).
74 * A couple of "git svn" updates.
76 * More markings of messages for i18n, with updates to various tests
77 to pass GETTEXT_POISON tests.
79 * "git archive" learned to handle files that are larger than 8GB and
80 commits far in the future than expressible by the traditional US-TAR
82 (merge 5caeeb8 jk/big-and-future-archive-tar later to maint).
84 * A new configuration variable core.sshCommand has been added to
85 specify what value for GIT_SSH_COMMAND to use per repository.
87 * "git worktree prune" protected worktrees that are marked as
88 "locked" by creating a file in a known location. "git worktree"
89 command learned a dedicated command pair to create and remove such
90 a file, so that the users do not have to do this with editor.
92 * A handful of "git svn" updates.
94 * "git push" learned to accept and pass extra options to the
95 receiving end so that hooks can read and react to them.
97 * "git status" learned to suggest "merge --abort" during a conflicted
98 merge, just like it already suggests "rebase --abort" during a
100 (merge b0a61ab mm/status-suggest-merge-abort later to maint).
102 * "git jump" script (in contrib/) has been updated a bit.
103 (merge a91e692 jk/git-jump later to maint).
105 * "git push" and "git clone" learned to give better progress meters
106 to the end user who is waiting on the terminal.
109 Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.
111 * "git fast-import" learned the same performance trick to avoid
112 creating too small a packfile as "git fetch" and "git push" have,
113 using *.unpackLimit configuration.
115 * When "git daemon" is run without --[init-]timeout specified, a
116 connection from a client that silently goes offline can hang around
117 for a long time, wasting resources. The socket-level KEEPALIVE has
118 been enabled to allow the OS to notice such failed connections.
120 * "git upload-pack" command has been updated to use the parse-options
123 * The "git apply" standalone program is being libified; this is the
124 first step to move many state variables into a structure that can
125 be explicitly (re)initialized to make the machinery callable more
128 * HTTP transport gained an option to produce more detailed debugging
130 (merge 73e57aa ep/http-curl-trace later to maint).
132 * Instead of taking advantage of a struct string_list that is
133 allocated with all NULs happens to be STRING_LIST_INIT_NODUP kind,
134 initialize them explicitly as such, to document their behaviour
136 (merge 2721ce2 jk/string-list-static-init later to maint).
138 * HTTPd tests learned to show the server error log to help diagnosing
140 (merge 44f243d nd/test-lib-httpd-show-error-log-in-verbose later to maint).
142 * The ownership rule for the piece of memory that hold references to
143 be fetched in "git fetch" was screwy, which has been cleaned up.
145 * "git bisect" makes an internal call to "git diff-tree" when
146 bisection finds the culprit, but this call did not initialize the
147 data structure to pass to the diff-tree API correctly.
149 * Further preparatory clean-up for "worktree" feature continues.
150 (merge 0409e0b nd/worktree-cleanup-post-head-protection later to maint).
152 * Formats of the various data (and how to validate them) where we use
153 GPG signature have been documented.
155 * A new run-command API function pipe_command() is introduced to
156 sanely feed data to the standard input while capturing data from
157 the standard output and the standard error of an external process,
158 which is cumbersome to hand-roll correctly without deadlocking.
160 The codepath to sign data in a prepared buffer with GPG has been
161 updated to use this API to read from the status-fd to check for
162 errors (instead of relying on GPG's exit status).
163 (merge efee955 jk/gpg-interface-cleanup later to maint).
165 * Allow t/perf framework to use the features from the most recent
166 version of Git even when testing an older installed version.
168 * The commands in the "log/diff" family have had an FILE* pointer in the
169 data structure they pass around for a long time, but some codepaths
170 used to always write to the standard output. As a preparatory step
171 to make "git format-patch" available to the internal callers, these
172 codepaths have been updated to consistently write into that FILE*
175 * Conversion from unsigned char sha1[20] to struct object_id
178 * Improve the look of the way "git fetch" reports what happened to
179 each ref that was fetched.
181 * The .c/.h sources are marked as such in our .gitattributes file so
182 that "git diff -W" and friends would work better.
183 (merge e82675a rs/help-c-source-with-gitattributes later to maint).
185 * Code clean-up to avoid using a variable string that compilers may
186 feel untrustable as printf-style format given to write_file()
189 * "git p4" used a location outside $GIT_DIR/refs/ to place its
190 temporary branches, which has been moved to refs/git-p4-tmp/.
192 * Existing autoconf generated test for the need to link with pthread
193 library did not check all the functions from pthread libraries;
194 recent FreeBSD has some functions in libc but not others, and we
195 mistakenly thought linking with libc is enough when it is not.
196 (merge a9b02de ew/autoconf-pthread later to maint).
198 * When "git fsck" reports a broken link (e.g. a tree object contains
199 a blob that does not exist), both containing object and the object
200 that is referred to were reported with their 40-hex object names.
201 The command learned the "--name-objects" option to show the path to
202 the containing object from existing refs (e.g. "HEAD~24^2:file.txt").
204 * Allow http daemon tests in Travis CI tests.
205 (merge d9d1426 ls/travis-enable-httpd-tests later to maint).
207 * Makefile assumed that -lrt is always available on platforms that
208 want to use clock_gettime() and CLOCK_MONOTONIC, which is not a
209 case for recent Mac OS X. The necessary symbols are often found in
210 libc on many modern systems and having -lrt on the command line, as
211 long as the library exists, had no effect, but when the platform
212 removes librt.a that is a different matter--having -lrt will break
215 This change could be seen as a regression for those who do need to
216 specify -lrt, as they now specifically ask for NEEDS_LIBRT when
217 building. Hopefully they are in the minority these days.
219 * Further preparatory work on the refs API before the pluggable
220 backend series can land.
222 * Error handling in the codepaths that updates refs has been
225 * The API to iterate over all the refs (i.e. for_each_ref(), etc.)
228 * A few tests that specifically target "git rebase -i" have been
231 * Dumb http transport on the client side has been optimized.
232 (merge ecba195 ew/http-walker later to maint).
234 * Users of the parse_options_concat() API function need to allocate
235 extra slots in advance and fill them with OPT_END() when they want
236 to decide the set of supported options dynamically, which makes the
237 code error-prone and hard to read. This has been corrected by tweaking
238 the API to allocate and return a new copy of "struct option" array.
239 (merge 023ff39 jk/parse-options-concat later to maint).
241 * "git fetch" exchanges batched have/ack messages between the sender
242 and the receiver, initially doubling every time and then falling
243 back to enlarge the window size linearly. The "smart http"
244 transport, being an half-duplex protocol, outgrows the preset limit
245 too quickly and becomes inefficient when interacting with a large
246 repository. The internal mechanism learned to grow the window size
247 more aggressively when working with the "smart http" transport.
250 Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
256 Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.8 in the maintenance
257 track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases'
260 * The commands in `git log` family take %C(auto) in a custom format
261 string. This unconditionally turned the color on, ignoring
262 --no-color or with --color=auto when the output is not connected to
263 a tty; this was corrected to make the format truly behave as
266 * "git rev-list --count" whose walk-length is limited with "-n"
267 option did not work well with the counting optimized to look at the
270 * "git show -W" (extend hunks to cover the entire function, delimited
271 by lines that match the "funcname" pattern) used to show the entire
272 file when a change added an entire function at the end of the file,
273 which has been fixed.
275 * The documentation set has been updated so that literal commands,
276 configuration variables and environment variables are consistently
277 typeset in fixed-width font and bold in manpages.
279 * "git svn propset" subcommand that was added in 2.3 days is
282 * The documentation tries to consistently spell "GPG"; when
283 referring to the specific program name, "gpg" is used.
285 * "git reflog" stopped upon seeing an entry that denotes a branch
286 creation event (aka "unborn"), which made it appear as if the
287 reflog was truncated.
289 * The git-prompt scriptlet (in contrib/) was not friendly with those
290 who uses "set -u", which has been fixed.
292 * compat/regex code did not cleanly compile.
294 * A codepath that used alloca(3) to place an unbounded amount of data
295 on the stack has been updated to avoid doing so.
297 * "git update-index --add --chmod=+x file" may be usable as an escape
298 hatch, but not a friendly thing to force for people who do need to
299 use it regularly. "git add --chmod=+x file" can be used instead.
301 * Build improvements for gnome-keyring (in contrib/)
303 * "git status" used to say "working directory" when it meant "working
306 * Comments about misbehaving FreeBSD shells have been clarified with
307 the version number (9.x and before are broken, newer ones are OK).
309 * "git cherry-pick A" worked on an unborn branch, but "git
310 cherry-pick A..B" didn't.
312 * Fix an unintended regression in v2.9 that breaks "clone --depth"
313 that recurses down to submodules by forcing the submodules to also
314 be cloned shallowly, which many server instances that host upstream
315 of the submodules are not prepared for.
317 * Fix unnecessarily waste in the idiomatic use of ': ${VAR=default}'
318 to set the default value, without enclosing it in double quotes.
320 * Some platform-specific code had non-ANSI strict declarations of C
321 functions that do not take any parameters, which has been
324 * The internal code used to show local timezone offset is not
325 prepared to handle timestamps beyond year 2100, and gave a
326 bogus offset value to the caller. Use a more benign looking
327 +0000 instead and let "git log" going in such a case, instead
330 * One among four invocations of readlink(1) in our test suite has
331 been rewritten so that the test can run on systems without the
332 command (others are in valgrind test framework and t9802).
334 * t/perf needs /usr/bin/time with GNU extension; the invocation of it
335 is updated to "gtime" on Darwin.
337 * A bug, which caused "git p4" while running under verbose mode to
338 report paths that are omitted due to branch prefix incorrectly, has
339 been fixed; the command said "Ignoring file outside of prefix" for
340 paths that are _inside_.
342 * The top level documentation "git help git" still pointed at the
343 documentation set hosted at now-defunct google-code repository.
344 Update it to point to https://git.github.io/htmldocs/git.html
347 * A helper function that takes the contents of a commit object and
348 finds its subject line did not ignore leading blank lines, as is
349 commonly done by other codepaths. Make it ignore leading blank
352 * For a long time, we carried an in-code comment that said our
353 colored output would work only when we use fprintf/fputs on
354 Windows, which no longer is the case for the past few years.
356 * "gc.autoPackLimit" when set to 1 should not trigger a repacking
357 when there is only one pack, but the code counted poorly and did
360 * Add a test to specify the desired behaviour that currently is not
361 available in "git rebase -Xsubtree=...".
363 * More mark-up updates to typeset strings that are expected to
364 literally typed by the end user in fixed-width font.
366 * "git commit --amend --allow-empty-message -S" for a commit without
367 any message body could have misidentified where the header of the
370 * "git rebase -i --autostash" did not restore the auto-stashed change
371 when the operation was aborted.
373 * Git does not know what the contents in the index should be for a
374 path added with "git add -N" yet, so "git grep --cached" should not
375 show hits (or show lack of hits, with -L) in such a path, but that
376 logic does not apply to "git grep", i.e. searching in the working
377 tree files. But we did so by mistake, which has been corrected.
379 * "git blame -M" missed a single line that was moved within the file.
381 * Fix recently introduced codepaths that are involved in parallel
382 submodule operations, which gave up on reading too early, and
383 could have wasted CPU while attempting to write under a corner
386 * "git grep -i" has been taught to fold case in non-ascii locales
389 * A test that unconditionally used "mktemp" learned that the command
390 is not necessarily available everywhere.
392 * There are certain house-keeping tasks that need to be performed at
393 the very beginning of any Git program, and programs that are not
394 built-in commands had to do them exactly the same way as "git"
395 potty does. It was easy to make mistakes in one-off standalone
396 programs (like test helpers). A common "main()" function that
397 calls cmd_main() of individual program has been introduced to
398 make it harder to make mistakes.
399 (merge de61ceb jk/common-main later to maint).
401 * The test framework learned a new helper test_match_signal to
402 check an exit code from getting killed by an expected signal.
404 * General code clean-up around a helper function to write a
405 single-liner to a file.
406 (merge 7eb6e10 jk/write-file later to maint).
408 * One part of "git am" had an oddball helper function that called
409 stuff from outside "his" as opposed to calling what we have "ours",
410 which was not gender-neutral and also inconsistent with the rest of
411 the system where outside stuff is usuall called "theirs" in
414 * "git blame file" allowed the lineage of lines in the uncommitted,
415 unadded contents of "file" to be inspected, but it refused when
416 "file" did not appear in the current commit. When "file" was
417 created by renaming an existing file (but the change has not been
418 committed), this restriction was unnecessarily tight.
419 (merge c66b470 mh/blame-worktree later to maint).
421 * "git add -N dir/file && git write-tree" produced an incorrect tree
422 when there are other paths in the same directory that sorts after
424 (merge 6d6a782 nd/cache-tree-ita later to maint).
426 * "git fetch http://user:pass@host/repo..." scrubbed the userinfo
427 part, but "git push" didn't.
428 (merge 68f3c07 jk/push-scrub-url later to maint).
430 * "git merge" with renormalization did not work well with
431 merge-recursive, due to "safer crlf" conversion kicking in when it
433 (merge 1335d76 jc/renormalize-merge-kill-safer-crlf later to maint).
435 * The use of strbuf in "git rm" to build filename to remove was a bit
436 suboptimal, which has been fixed.
437 (merge deb8e15 rs/rm-strbuf-optim later to maint).
439 * An age old bug that caused "git diff --ignore-space-at-eol"
440 misbehave has been fixed.
441 (merge 044fb19 js/ignore-space-at-eol later to maint).
443 * "git notes merge" had a code to see if a path exists (and fails if
444 it does) and then open the path for writing (when it doesn't).
445 Replace it with open with O_EXCL.
446 (merge deb9c15 rs/notes-merge-no-toctou later to maint).
448 * "git pack-objects" and "git index-pack" mostly operate with off_t
449 when talking about the offset of objects in a packfile, but there
450 were a handful of places that used "unsigned long" to hold that
451 value, leading to an unintended truncation.
452 (merge ec9d224 nd/pack-ofs-4gb-limit later to maint).
454 * Recent update to "git daemon" tries to enable the socket-level
455 KEEPALIVE, but when it is spawned via inetd, the standard input
456 file descriptor may not necessarily be connected to a socket.
457 Suppress an ENOTSOCK error from setsockopt().
458 (merge fab6027 ew/daemon-socket-keepalive later to maint).
460 * Recent FreeBSD stopped making perl available at /usr/bin/perl;
461 switch the default the built-in path to /usr/local/bin/perl on not
462 too ancient FreeBSD releases.
463 (merge 259f22a ew/find-perl-on-freebsd-in-local later to maint).
465 * "git commit --help" said "--no-verify" is only about skipping the
466 pre-commit hook, and failed to say that it also skipped the
468 (merge def480f os/no-verify-skips-commit-msg-too later to maint).
470 * "git merge" in Git v2.9 was taught to forbid merging an unrelated
471 lines of history by default, but that is exactly the kind of thing
472 the "--rejoin" mode of "git subtree" (in contrib/) wants to do.
473 "git subtree" has been taught to use the "--allow-unrelated-histories"
474 option to override the default.
475 (merge 0f12c7d da/subtree-2.9-regression later to maint).
477 * The build procedure for "git persistent-https" helper (in contrib/)
478 has been updated so that it can be built with more recent versions
480 (merge accb613 pm/build-persistent-https-with-recent-go later to maint).
482 * There is an optimization used in "git diff $treeA $treeB" to borrow
483 an already checked-out copy in the working tree when it is known to
484 be the same as the blob being compared, expecting that open/mmap of
485 such a file is faster than reading it from the object store, which
486 involves inflating and applying delta. This however kicked in even
487 when the checked-out copy needs to go through the convert-to-git
488 conversion (including the clean filter), which defeats the whole
489 point of the optimization. The optimization has been disabled when
490 the conversion is necessary.
491 (merge 06dec43 jk/diff-do-not-reuse-wtf-needs-cleaning later to maint).
493 * "git -c grep.patternType=extended log --basic-regexp" misbehaved
494 because the internal API to access the grep machinery was not
496 (merge 8465541 jc/grep-commandline-vs-configuration later to maint).
498 * Other minor clean-ups and documentation updates
499 (merge e51b0df pb/commit-editmsg-path later to maint).
500 (merge b333d0d jk/send-pack-stdio later to maint).
501 (merge fcf0fe9 lf/sideband-returns-void later to maint).
502 (merge c2691e2 ah/unpack-trees-advice-messages later to maint).
503 (merge c61b2af lf/recv-sideband-cleanup later to maint).
504 (merge 31471ba rs/use-strbuf-addbuf later to maint).
505 (merge 503e224 nd/test-helpers later to maint).
506 (merge 16726cf jc/doc-diff-filter-exclude later to maint).
507 (merge fd2e7da rs/worktree-use-strbuf-absolute-path later to maint).
508 (merge 406621f sb/submodule-deinit-all later to maint).
509 (merge 55cbe18 rs/submodule-config-code-cleanup later to maint).
510 (merge 280abfd sb/pack-protocol-doc-nak later to maint).