7 UI, Workflows & Features
9 * "git format-patch --cover-letter HEAD^" to format a single patch
10 with a separate cover letter now numbers the output as [PATCH 0/1]
11 and [PATCH 1/1] by default.
13 * An incoming "git push" that attempts to push too many bytes can now
14 be rejected by setting a new configuration variable at the receiving
17 * "git nosuchcommand --help" said "No manual entry for gitnosuchcommand",
18 which was not intuitive, given that "git nosuchcommand" said "git:
19 'nosuchcommand' is not a git command".
21 * "git clone --resurse-submodules --reference $path $URL" is a way to
22 reduce network transfer cost by borrowing objects in an existing
23 $path repository when cloning the superproject from $URL; it
24 learned to also peek into $path for presense of corresponding
25 repositories of submodules and borrow objects from there when able.
27 * The "git diff --submodule={short,log}" mechanism has been enhanced
28 to allow "--submodule=diff" to show the patch between the submodule
29 commits bound to the superproject.
31 * Even though "git hash-objects", which is a tool to take an
32 on-filesystem data stream and put it into the Git object store,
33 allowed to perform the "outside-world-to-Git" conversions (e.g.
34 end-of-line conversions and application of the clean-filter), and
35 it had the feature on by default from very early days, its reverse
36 operation "git cat-file", which takes an object from the Git object
37 store and externalize for the consumption by the outside world,
38 lacked an equivalent mechanism to run the "Git-to-outside-world"
39 conversion. The command learned the "--filters" option to do so.
41 * Output from "git diff" can be made easier to read by selecting
42 which lines are common and which lines are added/deleted
43 intelligently when the lines before and after the changed section
44 are the same. A command line option is added to help with the
45 experiment to find a good heuristics.
47 * In some projects, it is common to use "[RFC PATCH]" as the subject
48 prefix for a patch meant for discussion rather than application. A
49 new option "--rfc" was a short-hand for "--subject-prefix=RFC PATCH"
50 to help the participants of such projects.
52 * "git add --chmod=+x <pathspec>" added recently only toggled the
53 executable bit for paths that are either new or modified. This has
54 been corrected to flip the executable bit for all paths that match
58 Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.
60 * The delta-base-cache mechanism has been a key to the performance in
61 a repository with a tightly packed packfile, but it did not scale
62 well even with a larger value of core.deltaBaseCacheLimit.
64 * Enhance "git status --porcelain" output by collecting more data on
65 the state of the index and the working tree files, which may
66 further be used to teach git-prompt (in contrib/) to make fewer
69 * Extract a small helper out of the function that reads the authors
70 script file "git am" internally uses.
71 (merge a77598e jc/am-read-author-file later to maint).
73 * Lifts calls to exit(2) and die() higher in the callchain in
74 sequencer.c files so that more helper functions in it can be used
75 by callers that want to handle error conditions themselves.
77 * "git am" has been taught to make an internal call to "git apply"'s
78 innards without spawning the latter as a separate process.
80 * The ref-store abstraction was introduced to the refs API so that we
81 can plug in different backends to store references.
83 * The "unsigned char sha1[20]" to "struct object_id" conversion
84 continues. Notable changes in this round includes that ce->sha1,
85 i.e. the object name recorded in the cache_entry, turns into an
88 * JGit can show a fake ref "capabilities^{}" to "git fetch" when it
89 does not advertise any refs, but "git fetch" was not prepared to
90 see such an advertisement. When the other side disconnects without
91 giving any ref advertisement, we used to say "there may not be a
92 repository at that URL", but we may have seen other advertisement
93 like "shallow" and ".have" in which case we definitely know that a
94 repository is there. The code to detect this case has also been
97 * Some codepaths in "git pack-objects" were not ready to use an
98 existing pack bitmap; now they are and as the result they have
102 Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
108 Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.9 in the maintenance
109 track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases'
112 * Clarify various ways to specify the "revision ranges" in the
115 * "diff-highlight" script (in contrib/) learned to work better with
116 "git log -p --graph" output.
118 * The test framework left the number of tests and success/failure
119 count in the t/test-results directory, keyed by the name of the
120 test script plus the process ID. The latter however turned out not
121 to serve any useful purpose. The process ID part of the filename
124 * Having a submodule whose ".git" repository is somehow corrupt
125 caused a few commands that recurse into submodules loop forever.
127 * "git symbolic-ref -d HEAD" happily removes the symbolic ref, but
128 the resulting repository becomes an invalid one. Teach the command
129 to forbid removal of HEAD.
131 * A test spawned a short-lived background process, which sometimes
132 prevented the test directory from getting removed at the end of the
133 script on some platforms.
135 * Update a few tests that used to use GIT_CURL_VERBOSE to use the
136 newer GIT_TRACE_CURL.
138 * "git pack-objects --include-tag" was taught that when we know that
139 we are sending an object C, we want a tag B that directly points at
140 C but also a tag A that points at the tag B. We used to miss the
141 intermediate tag B in some cases.
142 (merge b773dde jk/pack-tag-of-tag later to maint).
144 * Update Japanese translation for "git-gui".
145 (merge 02748bc sy/git-gui-i18n-ja later to maint).
147 * "git fetch http::/site/path" did not die correctly and segfaulted
149 (merge d63ed6e jk/fix-remote-curl-url-wo-proto later to maint).
151 * "git commit-tree" stopped reading commit.gpgsign configuration
152 variable that was meant for Porcelain "git commit" in Git 2.9; we
153 forgot to update "git gui" to look at the configuration to match
155 (merge f14a310 js/git-gui-commit-gpgsign later to maint).
157 * "git add --chmod=+x" added recently lacked documentation, which has
159 (merge 7ef7903 et/add-chmod-x later to maint).
161 * "git log --cherry-pick" used to include merge commits as candidates
162 to be matched up with other commits, resulting a lot of wasted time.
163 The patch-id generation logic has been updated to ignore merges to
165 (merge 7c81040 jk/patch-ids-no-merges later to maint).
167 * The http transport (with curl-multi option, which is the default
168 these days) failed to remove curl-easy handle from a curlm session,
169 which led to unnecessary API failures.
170 (merge 2abc848 ew/http-do-not-forget-to-call-curl-multi-remove-handle later to maint).
172 * There were numerous corner cases in which the configuration files
173 are read and used or not read at all depending on the directory a
174 Git command was run, leading to inconsistent behaviour. The code
175 to set-up repository access at the beginning of a Git process has
176 been updated to fix them.
177 (merge 4d0efa1 jk/setup-sequence-update later to maint).
179 * "git diff -W" output needs to extend the context backward to
180 include the header line of the current function and also forward to
181 include the body of the entire current function up to the header
182 line of the next one. This process may have to merge to adjacent
183 hunks, but the code forgot to do so in some cases.
184 (merge 45d2f75 rs/xdiff-merge-overlapping-hunks-for-W-context later to maint).
186 * Performance tests done via "t/perf" did not use the same set of
187 build configuration if the user relied on autoconf generated
189 (merge cd5c281 ks/perf-build-with-autoconf later to maint).
191 * "git format-patch --base=..." feature that was recently added
192 showed the base commit information after "-- " e-mail signature
193 line, which turned out to be inconvenient. The base information
194 has been moved above the signature line.
195 (merge 480871e jt/format-patch-base-info-above-sig later to maint).
198 (merge 43073f8 va/i18n later to maint).
200 * Even when "git pull --rebase=preserve" (and the underlying "git
201 rebase --preserve") can complete without creating any new commit
202 (i.e. fast-forwards), it still insisted on having a usable ident
203 information (read: user.email is set correctly), which was less
204 than nice. As the underlying commands used inside "git rebase"
205 would fail with a more meaningful error message and advice text
206 when the bogus ident matters, this extra check was removed.
207 (merge 1e461c4 jk/rebase-i-drop-ident-check later to maint).
209 * "git gc --aggressive" used to limit the delta-chain length to 250,
210 which is way too deep for gaining additional space savings and is
211 detrimental for runtime performance. The limit has been reduced to
213 (merge 07e7dbf jk/reduce-gc-aggressive-depth later to maint).
215 * Documentation for individual configuration variables to control use
216 of color (like `color.grep`) said that their default value is
217 'false', instead of saying their default is taken from `color.ui`.
218 When we updated the default value for color.ui from 'false' to
219 'auto' quite a while ago, all of them broke. This has been
221 (merge 14d16e2 mm/config-color-ui-default-to-auto later to maint).
223 * The pretty-format specifier "%C(auto)" used by the "log" family of
224 commands to enable coloring of the output is taught to also issue a
225 color-reset sequence to the output.
226 (merge c99ad27 rs/c-auto-resets-attributes later to maint).
228 * A shell script example in check-ref-format documentation has been
230 (merge 92dece7 ep/doc-check-ref-format-example later to maint).
232 * "git checkout <word>" does not follow the usual disambiguation
233 rules when the <word> can be both a rev and a path, to allow
234 checking out a branch 'foo' in a project that happens to have a
235 file 'foo' in the working tree without having to disambiguate.
236 This was poorly documented and the check was incorrect when the
237 command was run from a subdirectory.
238 (merge b829b94 nd/checkout-disambiguation later to maint).
240 * Some codepaths in "git diff" used regexec(3) on a buffer that was
241 mmap(2)ed, which may not have a terminating NUL, leading to a read
242 beyond the end of the mapped region. This was fixed by introducing
243 a regexec_buf() helper that takes a <ptr,len> pair with REG_STARTEND
245 (merge b7d36ff js/regexec-buf later to maint).
247 * The procedure to build Git on Mac OS X for Travis CI hardcoded the
248 internal directory structure we assumed HomeBrew uses, which was a
249 no-no. The procedure has been updated to ask HomeBrew things we
250 need to know to fix this.
251 (merge f86f49b ls/travis-homebrew-path-fix later to maint).
253 * When "git rebase -i" is given a broken instruction, it told the
254 user to fix it with "--edit-todo", but didn't say what the step
255 after that was (i.e. "--continue").
256 (merge 37875b4 rt/rebase-i-broken-insn-advise later to maint).
258 * Documentation around tools to import from CVS was fairly outdated.
259 (merge 106b672 jk/doc-cvs-update later to maint).
261 * "git clone --recurse-submodules" lost the progress eye-candy in
262 recent update, which has been corrected.
264 * Other minor doc, test and build updates and code cleanups.
265 (merge e78d57e bw/pathspec-remove-unused-extern-decl later to maint).
266 (merge ce25e4c rs/checkout-some-states-are-const later to maint).
267 (merge a8342a4 rs/strbuf-remove-fix later to maint).
268 (merge b56aa5b rs/unpack-trees-reduce-file-scope-global later to maint).
269 (merge 5efc60c mr/vcs-svn-printf-ulong later to maint).
270 (merge a22ae75 rs/cocci later to maint).