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 is now removed.
17 * The default location "~/.git-credential-cache/socket" for the
18 socket used to communicate with the credential-cache daemon has
19 been moved to "~/.cache/git/credential/socket".
21 * Git now avoids blindly falling back to ".git" when the setup
22 sequence said we are _not_ in Git repository. A corner case that
23 happens to work right now may be broken by a call to die("BUG").
24 We've tried hard to locate such cases and fixed them, but there
25 might still be cases that need to be addressed--bug reports are
32 UI, Workflows & Features
34 * "git describe" and "git name-rev" have been taught to take more
35 than one refname patterns to restrict the set of refs to base their
36 naming output on, and also learned to take negative patterns to
37 name refs not to be used for naming via their "--exclude" option.
39 * Deletion of a branch "foo/bar" could remove .git/refs/heads/foo
40 once there no longer is any other branch whose name begins with
41 "foo/", but we didn't do so so far. Now we do.
43 * When "git merge" detects a path that is renamed in one history
44 while the other history deleted (or modified) it, it now reports
45 both paths to help the user understand what is going on in the two
46 histories being merged.
48 * The <url> part in "http.<url>.<variable>" configuration variable
49 can now be spelled with '*' that serves as wildcard.
50 E.g. "http.https://*.example.com.proxy" can be used to specify the
51 proxy used for https://a.example.com, https://b.example.com, etc.,
52 i.e. any host in the example.com domain.
54 * "git tag" did not leave useful message when adding a new entry to
55 reflog; this was left unnoticed for a long time because refs/tags/*
56 doesn't keep reflog by default.
58 * The "negative" pathspec feature was somewhat more cumbersome to use
59 than necessary in that its short-hand used "!" which needed to be
60 escaped from shells, and it required "exclude from what?" specified.
62 * The command line options for ssh invocation needs to be tweaked for
63 some implementations of SSH (e.g. PuTTY plink wants "-P <port>"
64 while OpenSSH wants "-p <port>" to specify port to connect to), and
65 the variant was guessed when GIT_SSH environment variable is used
66 to specify it. The logic to guess now applies to the command
67 specified by the newer GIT_SSH_COMMAND and also core.sshcommand
68 configuration variable, and comes with an escape hatch for users to
69 deal with misdetected cases.
71 * The "--git-path", "--git-common-dir", and "--shared-index-path"
72 options of "git rev-parse" did not produce usable output. They are
73 now updated to show the path to the correct file, relative to where
76 * "git diff -W" has been taught to handle the case where a new
77 function is added at the end of the file better.
79 * "git update-ref -d" and other operations to delete references did
80 not leave any entry in HEAD's reflog when the reference being
81 deleted was the current branch. This is not a problem in practice
82 because you do not want to delete the branch you are currently on,
83 but caused renaming of the current branch to something else not to
84 be logged in a useful way.
86 * "Cc:" on the trailer part does not have to conform to RFC strictly,
87 unlike in the e-mail header. "git send-email" has been updated to
88 ignore anything after '>' when picking addresses, to allow non-address
89 cruft like " # stable 4.4" after the address.
91 * When "git submodule init" decides that the submodule in the working
92 tree is its upstream, it now gives a warning as it is not a very
95 * "git stash push" takes a pathspec so that the local changes can be
96 stashed away only partially.
98 * Documentation for "git ls-files" did not refer to core.quotePath.
100 * The experimental "split index" feature has gained a few
101 configuration variables to make it easier to use.
103 * From a working tree of a repository, a new option of "rev-parse"
104 lets you ask if the repository is used as a submodule of another
105 project, and where the root level of the working tree of that
106 project (i.e. your superproject) is.
108 * The pathspec mechanism learned to further limit the paths that
109 match the pattern to those that have specified attributes attached
110 via the gitattributes mechanism.
112 * Our source code has used the SHA1_HEADER cpp macro after "#include"
113 in the C code to switch among the SHA-1 implementations. Instead,
114 list the exact header file names and switch among implementations
115 using "#ifdef BLK_SHA1/#include "block-sha1/sha1.h"/.../#endif";
116 this helps some IDE tools.
118 * The start-up sequence of "git" needs to figure out some configured
119 settings before it finds and set itself up in the location of the
120 repository and was quite messy due to its "chicken-and-egg" nature.
121 The code has been restructured.
123 * The command line prompt (in contrib/) learned a new 'tag' style
124 that can be specified with GIT_PS1_DESCRIBE_STYLE, to describe a
125 detached HEAD with "git describe --tags".
127 * The configuration file learned a new "includeIf.<condition>.path"
128 that includes the contents of the given path only when the
129 condition holds. This allows you to say "include this work-related
130 bit only in the repositories under my ~/work/ directory".
132 * Recent update to "rebase -i" started showing a message that is not
133 a warning with "warning:" prefix by mistake. This has been fixed.
135 * Recently we started passing the "--push-options" through the
136 external remote helper interface; now the "smart HTTP" remote
137 helper understands what to do with the passed information.
139 * "git describe --dirty" dies when it cannot be determined if the
140 state in the working tree matches that of HEAD (e.g. broken
141 repository or broken submodule). The command learned a new option
142 "git describe --broken" to give "$name-broken" (where $name is the
143 description of HEAD) in such a case.
145 * "git checkout" is taught the "--recurse-submodules" option.
147 * Recent enhancement to "git stash push" command to support pathspec
148 to allow only a subset of working tree changes to be stashed away
149 was found to be too chatty and exposed the internal implementation
150 detail (e.g. when it uses reset to match the index to HEAD before
151 doing other things, output from reset seeped out). These, and
152 other chattyness has been fixed.
154 * "git merge <message> HEAD <commit>" syntax that has been deprecated
155 since October 2007 has been removed.
157 * The refs completion for large number of refs has been sped up,
158 partly by giving up disambiguating ambiguous refs and partly by
159 eliminating most of the shell processing between 'git for-each-ref'
160 and 'ls-remote' and Bash's completion facility.
162 * On many keyboards, typing "@{" involves holding down SHIFT key and
163 one can easily end up with "@{Up..." when typing "@{upstream}". As
164 the upstream/push keywords do not appear anywhere else in the syntax,
165 we can safely accept them case insensitively without introducing
166 ambiguity or confusion to solve this.
168 * "git tag/branch/for-each-ref" family of commands long allowed to
169 filter the refs by "--contains X" (show only the refs that are
170 descendants of X), "--merged X" (show only the refs that are
171 ancestors of X), "--no-merged X" (show only the refs that are not
172 ancestors of X). One curious omission, "--no-contains X" (show
173 only the refs that are not descendants of X) has been added to
176 * The default behaviour of "git log" in an interactive session has
177 been changed to enable "--decorate".
179 * The output from "git status --short" has been extended to show
180 various kinds of dirtyness in submodules differently; instead of to
181 "M" for modified, 'm' and '?' can be shown to signal changes only
182 to the working tree of the submodule but not the commit that is
186 Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.
188 * The code to list branches in "git branch" has been consolidated
189 with the more generic ref-filter API.
191 * Resource usage while enumerating refs from alternate object store
192 has been optimized to help receiving end of "push" that hosts a
193 repository with many "forks".
195 * The gitattributes machinery is being taught to work better in a
196 multi-threaded environment.
198 * "git rebase -i" starts using the recently updated "sequencer" code.
200 * Code and design clean-up for the refs API.
202 * The preload-index code has been taught not to bother with the index
203 entries that are paths that are not checked out by "sparse checkout".
205 * Some warning() messages from "git clean" were updated to show the
206 errno from failed system calls.
208 * The "parse_config_key()" API function has been cleaned up.
210 * A test that creates a confusing branch whose name is HEAD has been
211 corrected not to do so.
213 * The code that parses header fields in the commit object has been
214 updated for (micro)performance and code hygiene.
216 * An helper function to make it easier to append the result from
217 real_path() to a strbuf has been added.
219 * Reduce authentication round-trip over HTTP when the server supports
220 just a single authentication method. This also improves the
221 behaviour when Git is misconfigured to enable http.emptyAuth
222 against a server that does not authenticate without a username
223 (i.e. not using Kerberos etc., which makes http.emptyAuth
226 * Windows port wants to use OpenSSL's implementation of SHA-1
227 routines, so let them.
229 * The t/perf performance test suite was not prepared to test not so
230 old versions of Git, but now it covers versions of Git that are not
233 * Add 32-bit Linux variant to the set of platforms to be tested with
236 * "git branch --list" takes the "--abbrev" and "--no-abbrev" options
237 to control the output of the object name in its "-v"(erbose)
238 output, but a recent update started ignoring them; fix it before
239 the breakage reaches to any released version.
241 * Picking two versions of Git and running tests to make sure the
242 older one and the newer one interoperate happily has now become
245 * "uchar [40]" to "struct object_id" conversion continues.
247 * "git tag --contains" used to (ab)use the object bits to keep track
248 of the state of object reachability without clearing them after
249 use; this has been cleaned up and made to use the newer commit-slab
252 * The "debug" helper used in the test framework learned to run
253 a command under "gdb" interactively.
255 * The "detect attempt to create collisions" variant of SHA-1
256 implementation by Marc Stevens (CWI) and Dan Shumow (Microsoft)
257 has been integrated and made the default.
259 * The test framework learned to detect unterminated here documents.
261 * The name-hash used for detecting paths that are different only in
262 cases (which matter on case insensitive filesystems) has been
263 optimized to take advantage of multi-threading when it makes sense.
265 * An earlier version of sha1dc/sha1.c that was merged to 'master'
266 compiled incorrectly on Windows, which has been fixed.
268 * "what URL do we want to update this submodule?" and "are we
269 interested in this submodule?" are split into two distinct
270 concepts, and then the way used to express the latter got extended,
271 paving a way to make it easier to manage a project with many
272 submodules and make it possible to later extend use of multiple
273 worktrees for a project with submodules.
275 * Some debugging output from "git describe" were marked for l10n,
276 but some weren't. Mark missing ones for l10n.
278 * Define a new task in .travis.yml that triggers a test session on
279 Windows run elsewhere.
281 * Conversion from unsigned char [40] to struct object_id continues.
283 * The "submodule" specific field in the ref_store structure is
284 replaced with a more generic "gitdir" that can later be used also
285 when dealing with ref_store that represents the set of refs visible
286 from the other worktrees.
288 Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
294 Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.12 in the maintenance
295 track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases'
298 * "git repack --depth=<n>" for a long time busted the specified depth
299 when reusing delta from existing packs. This has been corrected.
301 * The code to parse the command line "git grep <patterns>... <rev>
302 [[--] <pathspec>...]" has been cleaned up, and a handful of bugs
303 have been fixed (e.g. we used to check "--" if it is a rev).
305 * "git ls-remote" and "git archive --remote" are designed to work
306 without being in a directory under Git's control. However, recent
307 updates revealed that we randomly look into a directory called
308 .git/ without actually doing necessary set-up when working in a
309 repository. Stop doing so.
311 * "git show-branch" expected there were only very short branch names
312 in the repository and used a fixed-length buffer to hold them
313 without checking for overflow.
315 * A caller of tempfile API that uses stdio interface to write to
316 files may ignore errors while writing, which is detected when
317 tempfile is closed (with a call to ferror()). By that time, the
318 original errno that may have told us what went wrong is likely to
319 be long gone and was overwritten by an irrelevant value.
320 close_tempfile() now resets errno to EIO to make errno at least
323 * "git remote rm X", when a branch has remote X configured as the
324 value of its branch.*.remote, tried to remove branch.*.remote and
325 branch.*.merge and failed if either is unset.
327 * A "gc.log" file left by a backgrounded "gc --auto" disables further
328 automatic gc; it has been taught to run at least once a day (by
329 default) by ignoring a stale "gc.log" file that is too old.
331 * The code to parse "git -c VAR=VAL cmd" and set configuration
332 variable for the duration of cmd had two small bugs, which have
335 * user.email that consists of only cruft chars should consistently
336 error out, but didn't.
338 * "git upload-pack", which is a counter-part of "git fetch", did not
339 report a request for a ref that was not advertised as invalid.
340 This is generally not a problem (because "git fetch" will stop
341 before making such a request), but is the right thing to do.
343 * A leak in a codepath to read from a packed object in (rare) cases
346 * When a redirected http transport gets an error during the
347 redirected request, we ignored the error we got from the server,
348 and ended up giving a not-so-useful error message.
350 * The patch subcommand of "git add -i" was meant to have paths
351 selection prompt just like other subcommand, unlike "git add -p"
352 directly jumps to hunk selection. Recently, this was broken and
353 "add -i" lost the paths selection dialog, but it now has been
356 * Git v2.12 was shipped with an embarrassing breakage where various
357 operations that verify paths given from the user stopped dying when
358 seeing an issue, and instead later triggering segfault.
360 * There is no need for Python only to give a few messages to the
361 standard error stream, but we somehow did.
363 * The code to parse "git log -L..." command line was buggy when there
364 are many ranges specified with -L; overrun of the allocated buffer
367 * The command-line parsing of "git log -L" copied internal data
368 structures using incorrect size on ILP32 systems.
370 * "git diff --quiet" relies on the size field in diff_filespec to be
371 correctly populated, but diff_populate_filespec() helper function
372 made an incorrect short-cut when asked only to populate the size
373 field for paths that need to go through convert_to_git() (e.g. CRLF
376 * A few tests were run conditionally under (rare) conditions where
377 they cannot be run (like running cvs tests under 'root' account).
379 * "git branch @" created refs/heads/@ as a branch, and in general the
380 code that handled @{-1} and @{upstream} was a bit too loose in
383 * "git fetch" that requests a commit by object name, when the other
384 side does not allow such an request, failed without much
387 * "git filter-branch --prune-empty" drops a single-parent commit that
388 becomes a no-op, but did not drop a root commit whose tree is empty.
390 * Recent versions of Git treats http alternates (used in dumb http
391 transport) just like HTTP redirects and requires the client to
392 enable following it, due to security concerns. But we forgot to
393 give a warning when we decide not to honor the alternates.
395 * "git push" had a handful of codepaths that could lead to a deadlock
396 when unexpected error happened, which has been fixed.
398 * "Dumb http" transport used to misparse a nonsense http-alternates
399 response, which has been fixed.
401 * "git add -p <pathspec>" unnecessarily expanded the pathspec to a
402 list of individual files that matches the pathspec by running "git
403 ls-files <pathspec>", before feeding it to "git diff-index" to see
404 which paths have changes, because historically the pathspec
405 language supported by "diff-index" was weaker. These days they are
406 equivalent and there is no reason to internally expand it. This
407 helps both performance and avoids command line argument limit on
409 (merge 7288e12cce jk/add-i-use-pathspecs later to maint).
411 * "git status --porcelain" is supposed to give a stable output, but a
412 few strings were left as translatable by mistake.
414 * "git revert -m 0 $merge_commit" complained that reverting a merge
415 needs to say relative to which parent the reversion needs to
416 happen, as if "-m 0" weren't given. The correct diagnosis is that
417 "-m 0" does not refer to the first parent ("-m 1" does). This has
420 * Code to read submodule.<name>.ignore config did not state the
421 variable name correctly when giving an error message diagnosing
424 * Fix for NO_PTHREADS build.
426 * Fix for potential segv introduced in v2.11.0 and later (also
427 v2.10.2) to "git log --pickaxe-regex -S".
429 * A few unterminated here documents in tests were fixed, which in
430 turn revealed incorrect expectations the tests make. These tests
433 * Fix for NO_PTHREADS option.
434 (merge 2225e1ea20 bw/grep-recurse-submodules later to maint).
436 * Git now avoids blindly falling back to ".git" when the setup
437 sequence said we are _not_ in Git repository. A corner case that
438 happens to work right now may be broken by a call to die("BUG").
439 (merge b1ef400eec jk/no-looking-at-dotgit-outside-repo-final later to maint).
441 * A few commands that recently learned the "--recurse-submodule"
442 option misbehaved when started from a subdirectory of the
444 (merge b2dfeb7c00 bw/recurse-submodules-relative-fix later to maint).
446 * FreeBSD implementation of getcwd(3) behaved differently when an
447 intermediate directory is unreadable/unsearchable depending on the
448 length of the buffer provided, which our strbuf_getcwd() was not
449 aware of. strbuf_getcwd() has been taught to cope with it better.
450 (merge a54e938e5b rs/freebsd-getcwd-workaround later to maint).
452 * A recent update to "rebase -i" stopped running hooks for the "git
453 commit" command during "reword" action, which has been fixed.
455 * Removing an entry from a notes tree and then looking another note
456 entry from the resulting tree using the internal notes API
457 functions did not work as expected. No in-tree users of the API
458 has such access pattern, but it still is worth fixing.
460 * "git receive-pack" could have been forced to die by attempting
461 allocate an unreasonably large amount of memory with a crafted push
462 certificate; this has been fixed.
463 (merge f2214dede9 bc/push-cert-receive-fix later to maint).
465 * Update error handling for codepath that deals with corrupt loose
467 (merge 51054177b3 jk/loose-object-info-report-error later to maint).
469 * "git diff --submodule=diff" learned to work better in a project
470 with a submodule that in turn has its own submodules.
471 (merge 17b254cda6 sb/show-diff-for-submodule-in-diff-fix later to maint).
473 * Update the build dependency so that an update to /usr/bin/perl
474 etc. result in recomputation of perl.mak file.
475 (merge c59c4939c2 ab/regen-perl-mak-with-different-perl later to maint).
477 * "git push --recurse-submodules --push-option=<string>" learned to
478 propagate the push option recursively down to pushes in submodules.
480 * If a patch e-mail had its first paragraph after an in-body header
481 indented (even after a blank line after the in-body header line),
482 the indented line was mistook as a continuation of the in-body
483 header. This has been fixed.
484 (merge fd1062e52e lt/mailinfo-in-body-header-continuation later to maint).
486 * Clean up fallouts from recent tightening of the set-up sequence,
487 where Git barfs when repository information is accessed without
488 first ensuring that it was started in a repository.
489 (merge bccb22cbb1 jk/no-looking-at-dotgit-outside-repo later to maint).
491 * "git p4" used "name-rev HEAD" when it wants to learn what branch is
492 checked out; it should use "symbolic-ref HEAD".
493 (merge eff451101d ld/p4-current-branch-fix later to maint).
495 * Other minor doc, test and build updates and code cleanups.
496 (merge df2a6e38b7 jk/pager-in-use later to maint).
497 (merge 75ec4a6cb0 ab/branch-list-doc later to maint).
498 (merge 3e5b36c637 sg/skip-prefix-in-prettify-refname later to maint).
499 (merge 2c5e2865cc jk/fast-import-cleanup later to maint).
500 (merge 4473060bc2 ab/test-readme-updates later to maint).
501 (merge 48a96972fd ab/doc-submitting later to maint).
502 (merge f5c2bc2b96 jk/make-coccicheck-detect-errors later to maint).
503 (merge c105f563d1 cc/untracked later to maint).
504 (merge 8668976b53 jc/unused-symbols later to maint).
505 (merge fba275dc93 jc/bs-t-is-not-a-tab-for-sed later to maint).
506 (merge be6ed145de mm/ls-files-s-doc later to maint).
507 (merge 60b091c679 qp/bisect-docfix later to maint).
508 (merge 47242cd103 ah/diff-files-ours-theirs-doc later to maint).
509 (merge 35ad44cbd8 sb/submodule-rm-absorb later to maint).
510 (merge 0301f1fd92 va/i18n-perl-scripts later to maint).
511 (merge 733e064d98 vn/revision-shorthand-for-side-branch-log later to maint).