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1 Git 2.5 Release Notes
2 =====================
4 Updates since v2.4
5 ------------------
7 UI, Workflows & Features
9 * The bash completion script (in contrib/) learned a few options that
10 "git revert" takes.
12 * Whitespace breakages in deleted and context lines can also be
13 painted in the output of "git diff" and friends with the new
14 --ws-error-highlight option.
16 * List of commands shown by "git help" are grouped along the workflow
17 elements to help early learners.
19 * "git p4" now detects the filetype (e.g. binary) correctly even when
20 the files are opened exclusively.
22 * git p4 attempts to better handle branches in Perforce.
24 * "git p4" learned "--changes-block-size <n>" to read the changes in
25 chunks from Perforce, instead of making one call to "p4 changes"
26 that may trigger "too many rows scanned" error from Perforce.
28 * More workaround for Perforce's row number limit in "git p4".
30 * Unlike "$EDITOR" and "$GIT_EDITOR" that can hold the path to the
31 command and initial options (e.g. "/path/to/emacs -nw"), 'git p4'
32 did not let the shell interpolate the contents of the environment
33 variable that name the editor "$P4EDITOR" (and "$EDITOR", too).
34 This release makes it in line with the rest of Git, as well as with
35 Perforce.
37 * A new short-hand <branch>@{push} denotes the remote-tracking branch
38 that tracks the branch at the remote the <branch> would be pushed
39 to.
41 * "git show-branch --topics HEAD" (with no other arguments) did not
42 do anything interesting. Instead, contrast the given revision
43 against all the local branches by default.
45 * A replacement for contrib/workdir/git-new-workdir that does not
46 rely on symbolic links and make sharing of objects and refs safer
47 by making the borrowee and borrowers aware of each other.
49 Consider this as still an experimental feature; the UI will likely
50 to change.
52 * Tweak the sample "store" backend of the credential helper to honor
53 XDG configuration file locations when specified.
55 * A heuristic we use to catch mistyped paths on the command line
56 "git <cmd> <revs> <pathspec>" is to make sure that all the non-rev
57 parameters in the later part of the command line are names of the
58 files in the working tree, but that means "git grep $str -- \*.c"
59 must always be disambiguated with "--", because nobody sane will
60 create a file whose name literally is asterisk-dot-see. Loosen the
61 heuristic to declare that with a wildcard string the user likely
62 meant to give us a pathspec.
64 * "git merge FETCH_HEAD" learned that the previous "git fetch" could
65 be to create an Octopus merge, i.e. recording multiple branches
66 that are not marked as "not-for-merge"; this allows us to lose an
67 old style invocation "git merge <msg> HEAD $commits..." in the
68 implementation of "git pull" script; the old style syntax can now
69 be deprecated (but not removed yet).
71 * Filter scripts were run with SIGPIPE disabled on the Git side,
72 expecting that they may not read what Git feeds them to filter.
73 We however treated a filter that does not read its input fully
74 before exiting as an error. We no longer do and ignore EPIPE
75 when writing to feed the filter scripts.
77 This changes semantics, but arguably in a good way. If a filter
78 can produce its output without fully consuming its input using
79 whatever magic, we now let it do so, instead of diagnosing it
80 as a programming error.
82 * Instead of dying immediately upon failing to obtain a lock, the
83 locking (of refs etc) retries after a short while with backoff.
85 * Introduce http.<url>.SSLCipherList configuration variable to tweak
86 the list of cipher suite to be used with libcURL when talking with
87 https:// sites.
89 * "git subtree" script (in contrib/) used "echo -n" to produce
90 progress messages in a non-portable way.
92 * "git subtree" script (in contrib/) does not have --squash option
93 when pushing, but the documentation and help text pretended as if
94 it did.
96 * The Git subcommand completion (in contrib/) no longer lists credential
97 helpers among candidates; they are not something the end user would
98 invoke interactively.
100 * The index file can be taught with "update-index --untracked-cache"
101 to optionally remember already seen untracked files, in order to
102 speed up "git status" in a working tree with tons of cruft.
104 * "git mergetool" learned to drive WinMerge as a backend.
106 * "git upload-pack" that serves "git fetch" can be told to serve
107 commits that are not at the tip of any ref, as long as they are
108 reachable from a ref, with uploadpack.allowReachableSHA1InWant
109 configuration variable.
111 * "git cat-file --batch(-check)" learned the "--follow-symlinks"
112 option that follows an in-tree symbolic link when asked about an
113 object via extended SHA-1 syntax, e.g. HEAD:RelNotes that points at
114 Documentation/RelNotes/2.5.0.txt. With the new option, the command
115 behaves as if HEAD:Documentation/RelNotes/2.5.0.txt was given as
116 input instead.
118 Consider this as still an experimental and incomplete feature:
120 - We may want to do the same for in-index objects, e.g.
121 asking for :RelNotes with this option should give
122 :Documentation/RelNotes/2.5.0.txt, too
124 - "git cat-file --follow-symlinks blob HEAD:RelNotes"
125 may also be something we want to allow in the future.
127 * "git send-email" learned the alias file format used by the sendmail
128 program (in a simplified form; we obviously do not feed pipes).
130 * "git am" learned am.threeWay configuration variable.
132 * Traditionally, external low-level 3-way merge drivers are expected
133 to produce their results based solely on the contents of the three
134 variants given in temporary files named by %O, %A and %B on their
135 command line. Additionally allow them to look at the final path
136 (given by %P).
138 * "git blame" learned blame.showEmail configuration variable.
140 * "git apply" cannot diagnose a patch corruption when the breakage is
141 to mark the length of the hunk shorter than it really is on the
142 hunk header line "@@ -l,k +m,n @@"; one special case it could is
143 when the hunk becomes no-op (e.g. k == n == 2 for two-line context
144 patch output), and it learned to do so in this special case.
146 * Add the "--allow-unknown-type" option to "cat-file" to allow
147 inspecting loose objects of an experimental or a broken type.
149 * Many long-running operations show progress eye-candy, even when
150 they are later backgrounded. Hide the eye-candy when the process
151 is sent to the background instead.
152 (merge a4fb76c lm/squelch-bg-progress later to maint).
155 Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.
157 * "unsigned char [20]" used throughout the code to represent object
158 names are being converted into a semi-opaque "struct object_id".
159 This effort is expected to interfere with other topics in flight,
160 but hopefully will give us one extra level of abstraction in the
161 end, when completed.
163 * for_each_ref() callback functions were taught to name the objects
164 not with "unsigned char sha1[20]" but with "struct object_id".
166 * Catch a programmer mistake to feed a pointer not an array to
167 ARRAY_SIZE() macro, by using a couple of GCC extensions.
169 * Some error messages in "git config" were emitted without calling
170 the usual error() facility.
172 * When "add--interactive" splits a hunk into two overlapping hunks
173 and then let the user choose only one, it sometimes feeds an
174 incorrect patch text to "git apply". Add tests to demonstrate
175 this.
177 I have a slight suspicion that this may be $gmane/87202 coming back
178 and biting us (I seem to have said "let's run with this and see
179 what happens" back then).
181 * More line-ending tests.
183 * An earlier rewrite to use strbuf_getwholeline() instead of fgets(3)
184 to read packed-refs file revealed that the former is unacceptably
185 inefficient. It has been optimized by using getdelim(3) when
186 available.
188 * The refs API uses ref_lock struct which had its own "int fd", even
189 though the same file descriptor was in the lock struct it contains.
190 Clean-up the code to lose this redundant field.
192 * There was a dead code that used to handle "git pull --tags" and
193 show special-cased error message, which was made irrelevant when
194 the semantics of the option changed back in Git 1.9 days.
195 (merge 19d122b pt/pull-tags-error-diag later to maint).
197 * Help us to find broken test script that splits the body part of the
198 test by mistaken use of wrong kind of quotes.
199 (merge d93d5d5 jc/test-prereq-validate later to maint).
201 * Developer support to automatically detect broken &&-chain in the
202 test scripts is now turned on by default.
203 (merge 92b269f jk/test-chain-lint later to maint).
205 * Error reporting mechanism used in "refs" API has been made more
206 consistent.
208 * "git pull" has more test coverage now.
210 * "git pull" has become more aware of the options meant for
211 underlying "git fetch" and then learned to use parse-options
212 parser.
214 Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
217 Fixes since v2.4
218 ----------------
220 Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.4 in the maintenance
221 track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases'
222 notes for details).
224 * Git 2.4 broke setting verbosity and progress levels on "git clone"
225 with native transports.
226 (merge 822f0c4 mh/clone-verbosity-fix later to maint).
228 * "git add -e" did not allow the user to abort the operation by
229 killing the editor.
230 (merge cb64800 jk/add-e-kill-editor later to maint).
232 * Memory usage of "git index-pack" has been trimmed by tens of
233 per-cent.
234 (merge f0e7f11 nd/slim-index-pack-memory-usage later to maint).
236 * "git rev-list --objects $old --not --all" to see if everything that
237 is reachable from $old is already connected to the existing refs
238 was very inefficient.
239 (merge b6e8a3b jk/still-interesting later to maint).
241 * "hash-object --literally" introduced in v2.2 was not prepared to
242 take a really long object type name.
243 (merge 1427a7f jc/hash-object later to maint).
245 * "git rebase --quiet" was not quite quiet when there is nothing to
246 do.
247 (merge 22946a9 jk/rebase-quiet-noop later to maint).
249 * The completion for "log --decorate=" parameter value was incorrect.
250 (merge af16bda sg/complete-decorate-full-not-long later to maint).
252 * "filter-branch" corrupted commit log message that ends with an
253 incomplete line on platforms with some "sed" implementations that
254 munge such a line. Work it around by avoiding to use "sed".
255 (merge df06201 jk/filter-branch-use-of-sed-on-incomplete-line later to maint).
257 * "git daemon" fails to build from the source under NO_IPV6
258 configuration (regression in 2.4).
259 (merge d358f77 jc/daemon-no-ipv6-for-2.4.1 later to maint).
261 * Some time ago, "git blame" (incorrectly) lost the convert_to_git()
262 call when synthesizing a fake "tip" commit that represents the
263 state in the working tree, which broke folks who record the history
264 with LF line ending to make their project portable across platforms
265 while terminating lines in their working tree files with CRLF for
266 their platform.
267 (merge 4bf256d tb/blame-resurrect-convert-to-git later to maint).
269 * We avoid setting core.worktree when the repository location is the
270 ".git" directory directly at the top level of the working tree, but
271 the code misdetected the case in which the working tree is at the
272 root level of the filesystem (which arguably is a silly thing to
273 do, but still valid).
274 (merge 84ccad8 jk/init-core-worktree-at-root later to maint).
276 * "git commit --date=now" or anything that relies on approxidate lost
277 the daylight-saving-time offset.
278 (merge f6e6362 jc/epochtime-wo-tz later to maint).
280 * Access to objects in repositories that borrow from another one on a
281 slow NFS server unnecessarily got more expensive due to recent code
282 becoming more cautious in a naive way not to lose objects to pruning.
283 (merge ee1c6c3 jk/prune-mtime later to maint).
285 * The codepaths that read .gitignore and .gitattributes files have been
286 taught that these files encoded in UTF-8 may have UTF-8 BOM marker at
287 the beginning; this makes it in line with what we do for configuration
288 files already.
289 (merge 27547e5 cn/bom-in-gitignore later to maint).
291 * a few helper scripts in the test suite did not report errors
292 correctly.
293 (merge de248e9 ep/fix-test-lib-functions-report later to maint).
295 * The default $HOME/.gitconfig file created upon "git config --global"
296 that edits it had incorrectly spelled user.name and user.email
297 entries in it.
298 (merge 7e11052 oh/fix-config-default-user-name-section later to maint).
300 * "git cat-file bl $blob" failed to barf even though there is no
301 object type that is "bl".
302 (merge b7994af jk/type-from-string-gently later to maint).
304 * The usual "git diff" when seeing a file turning into a directory
305 showed a patchset to remove the file and create all files in the
306 directory, but "git diff --no-index" simply refused to work. Also,
307 when asked to compare a file and a directory, imitate POSIX "diff"
308 and compare the file with the file with the same name in the
309 directory, instead of refusing to run.
310 (merge 0615173 jc/diff-no-index-d-f later to maint).
312 * "git rebase -i" moved the "current" command from "todo" to "done" a
313 bit too prematurely, losing a step when a "pick" did not even start.
314 (merge 8cbc57c ph/rebase-i-redo later to maint).
316 * The connection initiation code for "ssh" transport tried to absorb
317 differences between the stock "ssh" and Putty-supplied "plink" and
318 its derivatives, but the logic to tell that we are using "plink"
319 variants were too loose and falsely triggered when "plink" appeared
320 anywhere in the path (e.g. "/home/me/bin/uplink/ssh").
321 (merge baaf233 bc/connect-plink later to maint).
323 * We have prepended $GIT_EXEC_PATH and the path "git" is installed in
324 (typically "/usr/bin") to $PATH when invoking subprograms and hooks
325 for almost eternity, but the original use case the latter tried to
326 support was semi-bogus (i.e. install git to /opt/foo/git and run it
327 without having /opt/foo on $PATH), and more importantly it has
328 become less and less relevant as Git grew more mainstream (i.e. the
329 users would _want_ to have it on their $PATH). Stop prepending the
330 path in which "git" is installed to users' $PATH, as that would
331 interfere the command search order people depend on (e.g. they may
332 not like versions of programs that are unrelated to Git in /usr/bin
333 and want to override them by having different ones in /usr/local/bin
334 and have the latter directory earlier in their $PATH).
335 (merge a0b4507 jk/git-no-more-argv0-path-munging later to maint).
337 * core.excludesfile (defaulting to $XDG_HOME/git/ignore) is supposed
338 to be overridden by repository-specific .git/info/exclude file, but
339 the order was swapped from the beginning. This belatedly fixes it.
340 (merge 099d2d8 jc/gitignore-precedence later to maint).
342 * There was a commented-out (instead of being marked to expect
343 failure) test that documented a breakage that was fixed since the
344 test was written; turn it into a proper test.
345 (merge 66d2e04 sb/t1020-cleanup later to maint).
347 * The "log --decorate" enhancement in Git 2.4 that shows the commit
348 at the tip of the current branch e.g. "HEAD -> master", did not
349 work with --decorate=full.
350 (merge 429ad20 mg/log-decorate-HEAD later to maint).
352 * The ref API did not handle cases where 'refs/heads/xyzzy/frotz' is
353 removed at the same time as 'refs/heads/xyzzy' is added (or vice
354 versa) very well.
355 (merge c628edf mh/ref-directory-file later to maint).
357 * Multi-ref transaction support we merged a few releases ago
358 unnecessarily kept many file descriptors open, risking to fail with
359 resource exhaustion. This is for 2.4.x track.
360 (merge 185ce3a mh/write-refs-sooner-2.4 later to maint).
362 * "git bundle verify" did not diagnose extra parameters on the
363 command line.
364 (merge 7886cfa ps/bundle-verify-arg later to maint).
366 * Various documentation mark-up fixes to make the output more
367 consistent in general and also make AsciiDoctor (an alternative
368 formatter) happier.
369 (merge d0258b9 jk/asciidoc-markup-fix later to maint).
370 (merge ad3967a jk/stripspace-asciidoctor-fix later to maint).
371 (merge 975e382 ja/tutorial-asciidoctor-fix later to maint).
373 * The code to read pack-bitmap wanted to allocate a few hundred
374 pointers to a structure, but by mistake allocated and leaked memory
375 enough to hold that many actual structures. Correct the allocation
376 size and also have it on stack, as it is small enough.
377 (merge 599dc76 rs/plug-leak-in-pack-bitmaps later to maint).
379 * The pull.ff configuration was supposed to override the merge.ff
380 configuration, but it didn't.
381 (merge db9bb28 pt/pull-ff-vs-merge-ff later to maint).
383 * "git pull --log" and "git pull --no-log" worked as expected, but
384 "git pull --log=20" did not.
385 (merge 5061a44 pt/pull-log-n later to maint).
387 * "git rerere forget" in a repository without rerere enabled gave a
388 cryptic error message; it should be a silent no-op instead.
389 (merge 0544574 jk/rerere-forget-check-enabled later to maint).
391 * "git rebase -i" fired post-rewrite hook when it shouldn't (namely,
392 when it was told to stop sequencing with 'exec' insn).
393 (merge 141ff8f mm/rebase-i-post-rewrite-exec later to maint).
395 * Clarify that "log --raw" and "log --format=raw" are unrelated
396 concepts.
397 (merge 92de921 mm/log-format-raw-doc later to maint).
399 * Make "git stash something --help" error out, so that users can
400 safely say "git stash drop --help".
401 (merge 5ba2831 jk/stash-options later to maint).
403 * The clean/smudge interface did not work well when filtering an
404 empty contents (failed and then passed the empty input through).
405 It can be argued that a filter that produces anything but empty for
406 an empty input is nonsense, but if the user wants to do strange
407 things, then why not?
408 (merge f6a1e1e jh/filter-empty-contents later to maint).
410 * Communication between the HTTP server and http_backend process can
411 lead to a dead-lock when relaying a large ref negotiation request.
412 Diagnose the situation better, and mitigate it by reading such a
413 request first into core (to a reasonable limit).
414 (merge 636614f jk/http-backend-deadlock later to maint).
416 * "git clean pathspec..." tried to lstat(2) and complain even for
417 paths outside the given pathspec.
418 (merge 838d6a9 dt/clean-pathspec-filter-then-lstat later to maint).
420 * Recent "git prune" traverses young unreachable objects to safekeep
421 old objects in the reachability chain from them, which sometimes
422 caused error messages that are unnecessarily alarming.
423 (merge ce4e7b2 jk/squelch-missing-link-warning-for-unreachable later to maint).
425 * The configuration reader/writer uses mmap(2) interface to access
426 the files; when we find a directory, it barfed with "Out of memory?".
427 (merge 9ca0aaf jk/diagnose-config-mmap-failure later to maint).
429 * "color.diff.plain" was a misnomer; give it 'color.diff.context' as
430 a more logical synonym.
431 (merge 8dbf3eb jk/color-diff-plain-is-context later to maint).
433 * The setup code used to die when core.bare and core.worktree are set
434 inconsistently, even for commands that do not need working tree.
435 (merge fada767 jk/die-on-bogus-worktree-late later to maint).
437 * Recent Mac OS X updates breaks the logic to detect that the machine
438 is on the AC power in the sample pre-auto-gc script.
439 (merge c54c7b3 pa/auto-gc-mac-osx later to maint).
441 * "git commit --cleanup=scissors" was not careful enough to protect
442 against getting fooled by a line that looked like scissors.
443 (merge fbfa097 sg/commit-cleanup-scissors later to maint).
445 * "Have we lost a race with competing repack?" check was too
446 expensive, especially while receiving a huge object transfer
447 that runs index-pack (e.g. "clone" or "fetch").
448 (merge 0eeb077 jk/index-pack-reduce-recheck later to maint).
450 * The tcsh completion writes a bash scriptlet but that would have
451 failed for users with noclobber set.
452 (merge 0b1f688 af/tcsh-completion-noclobber later to maint).
454 * "git for-each-ref" reported "missing object" for 0{40} when it
455 encounters a broken ref. The lack of object whose name is 0{40} is
456 not the problem; the ref being broken is.
457 (merge 501cf47 mh/reporting-broken-refs-from-for-each-ref later to maint).
459 * Various fixes around "git am" that applies a patch to a history
460 that is not there yet.
461 (merge 6ea3b67 pt/am-abort-fix later to maint).
463 * "git fsck" used to ignore missing or invalid objects recorded in reflog.
464 (merge 19bf6c9 mh/fsck-reflog-entries later to maint).
466 * "git format-patch --ignore-if-upstream A..B" did not like to be fed
467 tags as boundary commits.
468 (merge 9b7a61d jc/do-not-feed-tags-to-clear-commit-marks later to maint).
470 * "git fetch --depth=<depth>" and "git clone --depth=<depth>" issued
471 a shallow transfer request even to an upload-pack that does not
472 support the capability.
473 (merge eb86a50 me/fetch-into-shallow-safety later to maint).
475 * Code cleanups and documentation updates.
476 (merge 0269f96 mm/usage-log-l-can-take-regex later to maint).
477 (merge 64f2589 nd/t1509-chroot-test later to maint).
478 (merge d201a1e sb/test-bitmap-free-at-end later to maint).
479 (merge 05bfc7d sb/line-log-plug-pairdiff-leak later to maint).
480 (merge 846e5df pt/xdg-config-path later to maint).
481 (merge 1154aa4 jc/plug-fmt-merge-msg-leak later to maint).
482 (merge 319b678 jk/sha1-file-reduce-useless-warnings later to maint).
483 (merge 9a35c14 fg/document-commit-message-stripping later to maint).
484 (merge bbf431c ps/doc-packfile-vs-pack-file later to maint).
485 (merge 309a9e3 jk/skip-http-tests-under-no-curl later to maint).
486 (merge ccd593c dl/branch-error-message later to maint).
487 (merge 22570b6 rs/janitorial later to maint).
488 (merge 5c2a581 mc/commit-doc-grammofix later to maint).
489 (merge ce41720 ah/usage-strings later to maint).
490 (merge e6a268c sb/glossary-submodule later to maint).
491 (merge ec48a76 sb/submodule-doc-intro later to maint).
492 (merge 14f8b9b jk/clone-dissociate later to maint).
493 (merge 055c7e9 sb/pack-protocol-mention-smart-http later to maint).
494 (merge 7c37a5d jk/make-fix-dependencies later to maint).
495 (merge fc0aa39 sg/merge-summary-config later to maint).
496 (merge 329af6c pt/t0302-needs-sanity later to maint).
497 (merge d614f07 fk/doc-format-patch-vn later to maint).
498 (merge 72dbb36 sg/completion-commit-cleanup later to maint).
499 (merge e654eb2 es/utf8-stupid-compiler-workaround later to maint).
500 (merge 34b935c es/osx-header-pollutes-mask-macro later to maint).
501 (merge ab7fade jc/prompt-document-ps1-state-separator later to maint).
502 (merge 25f600e mm/describe-doc later to maint).