7 UI, Workflows & Features
9 * An asterisk as a substring (as opposed to the entirety) of a path
10 component for both side of a refspec, e.g.
11 "refs/heads/o*:refs/remotes/heads/i*", is now allowed.
13 * New userdiff pattern definition for fountain screenwriting markup
14 format has been added.
16 * "git log" and friends learned a new "--date=format:..." option to
17 format timestamps using system's strftime(3).
19 * "git fast-import" learned to respond to the get-mark command via
20 its cat-blob-fd interface.
22 * "git rebase -i" learned "drop commit-object-name subject" command
23 as another way to skip replaying of a commit.
25 * A new configuration variable can enable "--follow" automatically
26 when "git log" is run with one pathspec argument.
28 * "git status" learned to show a more detailed information regarding
29 the "rebase -i" session in progress.
31 * "git cat-file" learned "--batch-all-objects" option to enumerate all
32 available objects in the repository more quickly than "rev-list
33 --all --objects" (the output includes unreachable objects, though).
35 * "git fsck" learned to ignore errors on a set of known-to-be-bad
36 objects, and also allows the warning levels of various kinds of
37 non-critical breakages to be tweaked.
39 * "git rebase -i"'s list of todo is made configurable.
41 * "git send-email" now performs alias-expansion on names that are
42 given via --cccmd, etc.
44 * An environment variable GIT_REPLACE_REF_BASE tells Git to look into
45 refs hierarchy other than refs/replace/ for the object replacement
48 * Allow untracked cache (experimental) to be used when sparse
49 checkout (experimental) is also in use.
51 * "git pull --rebase" has been taught to pay attention to
52 rebase.autostash configuration.
54 * The command-line completion script (in contrib/) has been updated.
56 * A negative !ref entry in multi-value transfer.hideRefs
57 configuration can be used to say "don't hide this one".
59 * After "git am" without "-3" stops, running "git am -" pays attention
60 to "-3" only for the patch that caused the original invocation
63 * When linked worktree is used, simultaneous "notes merge" instances
64 for the same ref in refs/notes/* are prevented from stomping on
68 Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.
70 * In preparation for allowing different "backends" to store the refs
71 in a way different from the traditional "one ref per file in
72 $GIT_DIR or in a $GIT_DIR/packed-refs file" filesystem storage,
73 direct filesystem access to ref-like things like CHERRY_PICK_HEAD
74 from scripts and programs has been reduced.
76 * Computation of untracked status indicator by bash prompt
77 script (in contrib/) has been optimized.
79 * Memory use reduction when commit-slab facility is used to annotate
80 sparsely (which is not recommended in the first place).
82 * Clean up refs API and make "git clone" less intimate with the
83 implementation detail.
85 * "git pull" was reimplemented in C.
87 * The packet tracing machinery allows to capture an incoming pack
88 data to a file for debugging.
90 * Move machinery to parse human-readable scaled numbers like 1k, 4M,
91 and 2G as an option parameter's value from pack-objects to
92 parse-options API, to make it available to other codepaths.
94 * "git verify-tag" and "git verify-commit" have been taught to share
95 more code, and then learned to optionally show the verification
96 message from the underlying GPG implementation.
98 * Various enhancements around "git am" reading patches generated by
99 foreign SCM have been made.
101 * Ref listing by "git branch -l" and "git tag -l" commands has
102 started to be rebuilt, based on the for-each-ref machinery.
104 * The code to perform multi-tree merges has been taught to repopulate
105 the cache-tree upon a successful merge into the index, so that
106 subsequent "diff-index --cached" (hence "status") and "write-tree"
107 (hence "commit") will go faster.
109 The same logic in "git checkout" may now be removed, but that is a
112 * Tests that assume how reflogs are represented on the filesystem too
113 much have been corrected.
115 * "git am" has been rewritten in "C".
117 * git_path() and mkpath() are handy helper functions but it is easy
118 to misuse, as the callers need to be careful to keep the number of
119 active results below 4. Their uses have been reduced.
121 * The "lockfile" API has been rebuilt on top of a new "tempfile" API.
123 * To prepare for allowing a different "ref" backend to be plugged in
124 to the system, update_ref()/delete_ref() have been taught about
125 ref-like things like MERGE_HEAD that are per-worktree (they will
126 always be written to the filesystem inside $GIT_DIR).
129 Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
135 Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.5 in the maintenance
136 track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases'
139 * "git subtree" (in contrib/) depended on "git log" output to be
140 stable, which was a no-no. Apply a workaround to force a
141 particular date format.
142 (merge e7aac44 da/subtree-date-confusion later to maint).
144 * An attempt to delete a ref by pushing into a repository whose HEAD
145 symbolic reference points at an unborn branch that cannot be
146 created due to ref D/F conflict (e.g. refs/heads/a/b exists, HEAD
147 points at refs/heads/a) failed.
148 (merge b112b14 jx/do-not-crash-receive-pack-wo-head later to maint).
150 * The low-level "git send-pack" did not honor 'user.signingkey'
151 configuration variable when sending a signed-push.
152 (merge d830d39 db/send-pack-user-signingkey later to maint).
154 * "sparse checkout" misbehaved for a path that is excluded from the
155 checkout when switching between branches that differ at the path.
156 (merge 7d78241 as/sparse-checkout-removal later to maint).
158 * An experimental "untracked cache" feature used uname(2) in a
159 slightly unportable way.
160 (merge 100e433 cb/uname-in-untracked later to maint).
162 * A "rebase" replays changes of the local branch on top of something
163 else, as such they are placed in stage #3 and referred to as
164 "theirs", while the changes in the new base, typically a foreign
165 work, are placed in stage #2 and referred to as "ours". Clarify
166 the "checkout --ours/--theirs".
167 (merge f303016 se/doc-checkout-ours-theirs later to maint).
169 * The "rev-parse --parseopt" mode parsed the option specification
170 and the argument hint in a strange way to allow '=' and other
171 special characters in the option name while forbidding them from
172 the argument hint. This made it impossible to define an option
173 like "--pair <key>=<value>" with "pair=key=value" specification,
174 which instead would have defined a "--pair=key <value>" option.
175 (merge 2d893df ib/scripted-parse-opt-better-hint-string later to maint).
177 * Often a fast-import stream builds a new commit on top of the
178 previous commit it built, and it often unconditionally emits a
179 "from" command to specify the first parent, which can be omitted in
180 such a case. This caused fast-import to forget the tree of the
181 previous commit and then re-read it from scratch, which was
182 inefficient. Optimize for this common case.
183 (merge 0df3245 mh/fast-import-optimize-current-from later to maint).
185 * Running an aliased command from a subdirectory when the .git thing
186 in the working tree is a gitfile pointing elsewhere did not work.
187 (merge d95138e nd/export-worktree later to maint).
189 * "Is this subdirectory a separate repository that should not be
190 touched?" check "git clean" was inefficient. This was replaced
191 with a more optimized check.
192 (merge 38ae878 ee/clean-remove-dirs later to maint).
194 * The "new-worktree-mode" hack in "checkout" that was added in
195 nd/multiple-work-trees topic has been removed by updating the
196 implementation of new "worktree add".
197 (merge 65f9b75 es/worktree-add-cleanup later to maint).
199 * Remove remaining cruft from "git checkout --to", which
200 transitioned to "git worktree add".
201 (merge 114ff88 es/worktree-add later to maint).
203 * An off-by-one error made "git remote" to mishandle a remote with a
204 single letter nickname.
205 (merge bc598c3 mh/get-remote-group-fix later to maint).
207 * "git clone $URL", when cloning from a site whose sole purpose is to
208 host a single repository (hence, no path after <scheme>://<site>/),
209 tried to use the site name as the new repository name, but did not
210 remove username or password when <site> part was of the form
211 <user>@<pass>:<host>. The code is taught to redact these.
212 (merge adef956 ps/guess-repo-name-at-root later to maint).
214 * Running tests with the "-x" option to make them verbose had some
215 unpleasant interactions with other features of the test suite.
216 (merge 9b5fe78 jk/test-with-x later to maint).
218 * t1509 test that requires a dedicated VM environment had some
219 bitrot, which has been corrected.
220 (merge faacc5a ps/t1509-chroot-test-fixup later to maint).
222 * "git pull" in recent releases of Git has a regression in the code
223 that allows custom path to the --upload-pack=<program>. This has
226 Note that this is irrelevant for 'master' with "git pull" rewritten
228 (merge 22d6857 mm/pull-upload-pack later to maint).
230 * When trying to see that an object does not exist, a state errno
231 leaked from our "first try to open a packfile with O_NOATIME and
232 then if it fails retry without it" logic on a system that refuses
233 O_NOATIME. This confused us and caused us to die, saying that the
234 packfile is unreadable, when we should have just reported that the
235 object does not exist in that packfile to the caller.
236 (merge dff6f28 cb/open-noatime-clear-errno later to maint).
238 * The codepath to produce error messages had a hard-coded limit to
239 the size of the message, primarily to avoid memory allocation while
241 (merge f4c3edc jk/long-error-messages later to maint).
243 * strbuf_read() used to have one extra iteration (and an unnecessary
244 strbuf_grow() of 8kB), which was eliminated.
245 (merge 3ebbd00 jh/strbuf-read-use-read-in-full later to maint).
247 * Code cleanups and documentation updates.
248 (merge 1c601af es/doc-clean-outdated-tools later to maint).
249 (merge 3581304 kn/tag-doc-fix later to maint).
250 (merge 3a59e59 kb/i18n-doc later to maint).
251 (merge 45abdee sb/remove-unused-var-from-builtin-add later to maint).
252 (merge 14691e3 sb/parse-options-codeformat later to maint).
253 (merge 4a6ada3 ad/bisect-cleanup later to maint).
254 (merge da4c5ad ta/docfix-index-format-tech later to maint).
255 (merge ae25fd3 sb/check-return-from-read-ref later to maint).
256 (merge b3325df nd/dwim-wildcards-as-pathspecs later to maint).