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
57 * When "git format-patch --stdout" output is placed as an in-body
58 header and it uses the RFC2822 header folding, "git am" failed to
59 put the header line back into a single logical line. The
60 underlying "git mailinfo" was taught to handle this properly.
62 * "gitweb" can spawn "highlight" to show blob contents with
63 (programming) language-specific syntax highlighting, but only
64 when the language is known. "highlight" can however be told
65 to make the guess itself by giving it "--force" option, which
68 * "git gui" l10n to Portuguese.
70 * When given an abbreviated object name that is not (or more
71 realistically, "no longer") unique, we gave a fatal error
72 "ambiguous argument". This error is now accompanied by hints that
73 lists the objects that begins with the given prefix. During the
74 course of development of this new feature, numerous minor bugs were
75 uncovered and corrected, the most notable one of which is that we
76 gave "short SHA1 xxxx is ambiguous." twice without good reason.
78 * "git log rev^..rev" is an often-used revision range specification
79 to show what was done on a side branch merged at rev. This has
80 gained a short-hand "rev^-1". In general "rev^-$n" is the same as
81 "^rev^$n rev", i.e. what has happened on other branches while the
82 history leading to nth parent was looking the other way.
84 * In recent versions of cURL, GSSAPI credential delegation is
85 disabled by default due to CVE-2011-2192; introduce a configuration
86 to selectively allow enabling this.
87 (merge 26a7b23429 ps/http-gssapi-cred-delegation later to maint).
90 Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.
92 * The delta-base-cache mechanism has been a key to the performance in
93 a repository with a tightly packed packfile, but it did not scale
94 well even with a larger value of core.deltaBaseCacheLimit.
96 * Enhance "git status --porcelain" output by collecting more data on
97 the state of the index and the working tree files, which may
98 further be used to teach git-prompt (in contrib/) to make fewer
101 * Extract a small helper out of the function that reads the authors
102 script file "git am" internally uses.
103 (merge a77598e jc/am-read-author-file later to maint).
105 * Lifts calls to exit(2) and die() higher in the callchain in
106 sequencer.c files so that more helper functions in it can be used
107 by callers that want to handle error conditions themselves.
109 * "git am" has been taught to make an internal call to "git apply"'s
110 innards without spawning the latter as a separate process.
112 * The ref-store abstraction was introduced to the refs API so that we
113 can plug in different backends to store references.
115 * The "unsigned char sha1[20]" to "struct object_id" conversion
116 continues. Notable changes in this round includes that ce->sha1,
117 i.e. the object name recorded in the cache_entry, turns into an
120 * JGit can show a fake ref "capabilities^{}" to "git fetch" when it
121 does not advertise any refs, but "git fetch" was not prepared to
122 see such an advertisement. When the other side disconnects without
123 giving any ref advertisement, we used to say "there may not be a
124 repository at that URL", but we may have seen other advertisement
125 like "shallow" and ".have" in which case we definitely know that a
126 repository is there. The code to detect this case has also been
129 * Some codepaths in "git pack-objects" were not ready to use an
130 existing pack bitmap; now they are and as the result they have
133 * The codepath in "git fsck" to detect malformed tree objects has
134 been updated not to die but keep going after detecting them.
137 Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
143 Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.9 in the maintenance
144 track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases'
147 * Clarify various ways to specify the "revision ranges" in the
150 * "diff-highlight" script (in contrib/) learned to work better with
151 "git log -p --graph" output.
153 * The test framework left the number of tests and success/failure
154 count in the t/test-results directory, keyed by the name of the
155 test script plus the process ID. The latter however turned out not
156 to serve any useful purpose. The process ID part of the filename
159 * Having a submodule whose ".git" repository is somehow corrupt
160 caused a few commands that recurse into submodules loop forever.
162 * "git symbolic-ref -d HEAD" happily removes the symbolic ref, but
163 the resulting repository becomes an invalid one. Teach the command
164 to forbid removal of HEAD.
166 * A test spawned a short-lived background process, which sometimes
167 prevented the test directory from getting removed at the end of the
168 script on some platforms.
170 * Update a few tests that used to use GIT_CURL_VERBOSE to use the
171 newer GIT_TRACE_CURL.
173 * "git pack-objects --include-tag" was taught that when we know that
174 we are sending an object C, we want a tag B that directly points at
175 C but also a tag A that points at the tag B. We used to miss the
176 intermediate tag B in some cases.
177 (merge b773dde jk/pack-tag-of-tag later to maint).
179 * Update Japanese translation for "git-gui".
180 (merge 02748bc sy/git-gui-i18n-ja later to maint).
182 * "git fetch http::/site/path" did not die correctly and segfaulted
184 (merge d63ed6e jk/fix-remote-curl-url-wo-proto later to maint).
186 * "git commit-tree" stopped reading commit.gpgsign configuration
187 variable that was meant for Porcelain "git commit" in Git 2.9; we
188 forgot to update "git gui" to look at the configuration to match
190 (merge f14a310 js/git-gui-commit-gpgsign later to maint).
192 * "git add --chmod=+x" added recently lacked documentation, which has
194 (merge 7ef7903 et/add-chmod-x later to maint).
196 * "git log --cherry-pick" used to include merge commits as candidates
197 to be matched up with other commits, resulting a lot of wasted time.
198 The patch-id generation logic has been updated to ignore merges to
200 (merge 7c81040 jk/patch-ids-no-merges later to maint).
202 * The http transport (with curl-multi option, which is the default
203 these days) failed to remove curl-easy handle from a curlm session,
204 which led to unnecessary API failures.
205 (merge 2abc848 ew/http-do-not-forget-to-call-curl-multi-remove-handle later to maint).
207 * There were numerous corner cases in which the configuration files
208 are read and used or not read at all depending on the directory a
209 Git command was run, leading to inconsistent behaviour. The code
210 to set-up repository access at the beginning of a Git process has
211 been updated to fix them.
212 (merge 4d0efa1 jk/setup-sequence-update later to maint).
214 * "git diff -W" output needs to extend the context backward to
215 include the header line of the current function and also forward to
216 include the body of the entire current function up to the header
217 line of the next one. This process may have to merge to adjacent
218 hunks, but the code forgot to do so in some cases.
219 (merge 45d2f75 rs/xdiff-merge-overlapping-hunks-for-W-context later to maint).
221 * Performance tests done via "t/perf" did not use the same set of
222 build configuration if the user relied on autoconf generated
224 (merge cd5c281 ks/perf-build-with-autoconf later to maint).
226 * "git format-patch --base=..." feature that was recently added
227 showed the base commit information after "-- " e-mail signature
228 line, which turned out to be inconvenient. The base information
229 has been moved above the signature line.
230 (merge 480871e jt/format-patch-base-info-above-sig later to maint).
233 (merge 43073f8 va/i18n later to maint).
235 * Even when "git pull --rebase=preserve" (and the underlying "git
236 rebase --preserve") can complete without creating any new commit
237 (i.e. fast-forwards), it still insisted on having a usable ident
238 information (read: user.email is set correctly), which was less
239 than nice. As the underlying commands used inside "git rebase"
240 would fail with a more meaningful error message and advice text
241 when the bogus ident matters, this extra check was removed.
242 (merge 1e461c4 jk/rebase-i-drop-ident-check later to maint).
244 * "git gc --aggressive" used to limit the delta-chain length to 250,
245 which is way too deep for gaining additional space savings and is
246 detrimental for runtime performance. The limit has been reduced to
248 (merge 07e7dbf jk/reduce-gc-aggressive-depth later to maint).
250 * Documentation for individual configuration variables to control use
251 of color (like `color.grep`) said that their default value is
252 'false', instead of saying their default is taken from `color.ui`.
253 When we updated the default value for color.ui from 'false' to
254 'auto' quite a while ago, all of them broke. This has been
256 (merge 14d16e2 mm/config-color-ui-default-to-auto later to maint).
258 * The pretty-format specifier "%C(auto)" used by the "log" family of
259 commands to enable coloring of the output is taught to also issue a
260 color-reset sequence to the output.
261 (merge c99ad27 rs/c-auto-resets-attributes later to maint).
263 * A shell script example in check-ref-format documentation has been
265 (merge 92dece7 ep/doc-check-ref-format-example later to maint).
267 * "git checkout <word>" does not follow the usual disambiguation
268 rules when the <word> can be both a rev and a path, to allow
269 checking out a branch 'foo' in a project that happens to have a
270 file 'foo' in the working tree without having to disambiguate.
271 This was poorly documented and the check was incorrect when the
272 command was run from a subdirectory.
273 (merge b829b94 nd/checkout-disambiguation later to maint).
275 * Some codepaths in "git diff" used regexec(3) on a buffer that was
276 mmap(2)ed, which may not have a terminating NUL, leading to a read
277 beyond the end of the mapped region. This was fixed by introducing
278 a regexec_buf() helper that takes a <ptr,len> pair with REG_STARTEND
280 (merge b7d36ff js/regexec-buf later to maint).
282 * The procedure to build Git on Mac OS X for Travis CI hardcoded the
283 internal directory structure we assumed HomeBrew uses, which was a
284 no-no. The procedure has been updated to ask HomeBrew things we
285 need to know to fix this.
286 (merge f86f49b ls/travis-homebrew-path-fix later to maint).
288 * When "git rebase -i" is given a broken instruction, it told the
289 user to fix it with "--edit-todo", but didn't say what the step
290 after that was (i.e. "--continue").
291 (merge 37875b4 rt/rebase-i-broken-insn-advise later to maint).
293 * Documentation around tools to import from CVS was fairly outdated.
294 (merge 106b672 jk/doc-cvs-update later to maint).
296 * "git clone --recurse-submodules" lost the progress eye-candy in
297 recent update, which has been corrected.
299 * A low-level function verify_packfile() was meant to show errors
300 that were detected without dying itself, but under some conditions
301 it didn't and died instead, which has been fixed.
302 (merge a9445d859e jk/verify-packfile-gently later to maint).
304 * When "git fetch" tries to find where the history of the repository
305 it runs in has diverged from what the other side has, it has a
306 mechanism to avoid digging too deep into irrelevant side branches.
307 This however did not work well over the "smart-http" transport due
308 to a design bug, which has been fixed.
309 (merge 06b3d386e0 jt/fetch-pack-in-vain-count-with-stateless later to maint).
311 * In the codepath that comes up with the hostname to be used in an
312 e-mail when the user didn't tell us, we looked at ai_canonname
313 field in struct addrinfo without making sure it is not NULL first.
314 (merge c375a7efa3 jk/ident-ai-canonname-could-be-null later to maint).
316 * "git worktree", even though it used the default_abbrev setting that
317 ought to be affected by core.abbrev configuration variable, ignored
318 the variable setting. The command has been taught to read the
319 default set of configuration variables to correct this.
320 (merge d49028e6e7 jc/worktree-config later to maint).
322 * "git init" tried to record core.worktree in the repository's
323 'config' file when GIT_WORK_TREE environment variable was set and
324 it was different from where GIT_DIR appears as ".git" at its top,
325 but the logic was faulty when .git is a "gitdir:" file that points
326 at the real place, causing trouble in working trees that are
327 managed by "git worktree". This has been corrected.
329 * Codepaths that read from an on-disk loose object were too loose in
330 validating what they are reading is a proper object file and
331 sometimes read past the data they read from the disk, which has
332 been corrected. H/t to Gustavo Grieco for reporting.
333 (merge d21f842690 jc/verify-loose-object-header later to maint).
335 * The original command line syntax for "git merge", which was "git
336 merge <msg> HEAD <parent>...", has been deprecated for quite some
337 time, and "git gui" was the last in-tree user of the syntax. This
338 is finally fixed, so that we can move forward with the deprecation.
339 (merge ff65e796f0 rs/git-gui-use-modern-git-merge-syntax later to maint).
341 * An author name, that spelled a backslash-quoted double quote in the
342 human readable part "My \"double quoted\" name", was not unquoted
343 correctly while applying a patch from a piece of e-mail.
344 (merge f357e5de31 kd/mailinfo-quoted-string later to maint).
346 * Doc update to clarify what "log -3 --reverse" does.
347 (merge 04be69478f pb/rev-list-reverse-with-count later to maint).
349 * Almost everybody uses DEFAULT_ABBREV to refer to the default
350 setting for the abbreviation, but "git blame" peeked into
351 underlying variable bypassing the macro for no good reason.
352 (merge 5293284b4d jc/blame-abbrev later to maint).
354 * The "graph" API used in "git log --graph" miscounted the number of
355 output columns consumed so far when drawing a padding line, which
356 has been fixed; this did not affect any existing code as nobody
357 tried to write anything after the padding on such a line, though.
358 (merge 1647793524 jk/graph-padding-fix later to maint).
360 * The code that parses the format parameter of for-each-ref command
361 has seen a micro-optimization.
362 (merge e94ce1394e sg/ref-filter-parse-optim later to maint).
364 * Other minor doc, test and build updates and code cleanups.
365 (merge e78d57e bw/pathspec-remove-unused-extern-decl later to maint).
366 (merge ce25e4c rs/checkout-some-states-are-const later to maint).
367 (merge a8342a4 rs/strbuf-remove-fix later to maint).
368 (merge b56aa5b rs/unpack-trees-reduce-file-scope-global later to maint).
369 (merge 5efc60c mr/vcs-svn-printf-ulong later to maint).
370 (merge a22ae75 rs/cocci later to maint).
371 (merge 45ccef87b3 rs/copy-array later to maint).
372 (merge 8201688ecd dt/mailinfo later to maint).