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1 Git 2.10 Release Notes
2 ======================
4 Backward compatibility notes
5 ----------------------------
7 Updates since v2.9
8 ------------------
10 UI, Workflows & Features
12 * "git pull --rebase --verify-signature" learned to warn the user
13 that "--verify-signature" is a no-op when rebasing.
15 * An upstream project can make a recommendation to shallowly clone
16 some submodules in the .gitmodules file it ships.
18 * "git worktree add" learned that '-' can be used as a short-hand for
19 "@{-1}", the previous branch.
21 * Update the funcname definition to support css files.
23 * The completion script (in contrib/) learned to complete "git
24 status" options.
26 * Messages that are generated by auto gc during "git push" on the
27 receiving end are now passed back to the sending end in such a way
28 that they are shown with "remote: " prefix to avoid confusing the
29 users.
31 * "git add -i/-p" learned to honor diff.compactionHeuristic
32 experimental knob, so that the user can work on the same hunk split
33 as "git diff" output.
35 * "upload-pack" allows a custom "git pack-objects" replacement when
36 responding to "fetch/clone" via the uploadpack.packObjectsHook.
37 (merge b738396 jk/upload-pack-hook later to maint).
39 * Teach format-patch and mailsplit (hence "am") how a line that
40 happens to begin with "From " in the e-mail message is quoted with
41 ">", so that these lines can be restored to their original shape.
42 (merge d9925d1 ew/mboxrd-format-am later to maint).
44 * "git repack" learned the "--keep-unreachable" option, which sends
45 loose unreachable objects to a pack instead of leaving them loose.
46 This helps heuristics based on the number of loose objects
47 (e.g. "gc --auto").
48 (merge e26a8c4 jk/repack-keep-unreachable later to maint).
50 * "log --graph --format=" learned that "%>|(N)" specifies the width
51 relative to the terminal's left edge, not relative to the area to
52 draw text that is to the right of the ancestry-graph section. It
53 also now accepts negative N that means the column limit is relative
54 to the right border.
56 * A careless invocation of "git send-email directory/" after editing
57 0001-change.patch with an editor often ends up sending both
58 0001-change.patch and its backup file, 0001-change.patch~, causing
59 embarrassment and a minor confusion. Detect such an input and
60 offer to skip the backup files when sending the patches out.
61 (merge 531220b jc/send-email-skip-backup later to maint).
63 * "git submodule update" that drives many "git clone" could
64 eventually hit flaky servers/network conditions on one of the
65 submodules; the command learned to retry the attempt.
67 * The output coloring scheme learned two new attributes, italic and
68 strike, in addition to existing bold, reverse, etc.
70 * "git log" learns log.showSignature configuration variable, and a
71 command line option "--no-show-signature" to countermand it.
72 (merge fce04c3 mj/log-show-signature-conf later to maint).
74 * A couple of "git svn" updates.
76 * More markings of messages for i18n, with updates to various tests
77 to pass GETTEXT_POISON tests.
79 * "git archive" learned to handle files that are larger than 8GB and
80 commits far in the future than expressible by the traditional US-TAR
81 format.
82 (merge 5caeeb8 jk/big-and-future-archive-tar later to maint).
84 * A new configuration variable core.sshCommand has been added to
85 specify what value for GIT_SSH_COMMAND to use per repository.
87 * "git worktree prune" protected worktrees that are marked as
88 "locked" by creating a file in a known location. "git worktree"
89 command learned a dedicated command pair to create and remove such
90 a file, so that the users do not have to do this with editor.
92 * A handful of "git svn" updates.
94 * "git push" learned to accept and pass extra options to the
95 receiving end so that hooks can read and react to them.
97 * "git status" learned to suggest "merge --abort" during a conflicted
98 merge, just like it already suggests "rebase --abort" during a
99 conflicted rebase.
101 * "git jump" script (in contrib/) has been updated a bit.
102 (merge a91e692 jk/git-jump later to maint).
104 * "git push" and "git clone" learned to give better progress meters
105 to the end user who is waiting on the terminal.
107 * An entry "git log --decorate" for the tip of the current branch is
108 shown as "HEAD -> name" (where "name" is the name of the branch);
109 paint the arrow in the same color as "HEAD", not in the color for
110 commits.
112 * "git format-patch" learned format.from configuration variable to
113 specify the default settings for its "--from" option.
115 * "git am -3" calls "git merge-recursive" when it needs to fall back
116 to a three-way merge; this call has been turned into an internal
117 subroutine call instead of spawning a separate subprocess.
119 * The command line completion scripts (in contrib/) now knows about
120 "git branch --delete/--move [--remote]".
121 (merge 2703c22 vs/completion-branch-fully-spelled-d-m-r later to maint).
124 Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.
126 * "git fast-import" learned the same performance trick to avoid
127 creating too small a packfile as "git fetch" and "git push" have,
128 using *.unpackLimit configuration.
130 * When "git daemon" is run without --[init-]timeout specified, a
131 connection from a client that silently goes offline can hang around
132 for a long time, wasting resources. The socket-level KEEPALIVE has
133 been enabled to allow the OS to notice such failed connections.
135 * "git upload-pack" command has been updated to use the parse-options
136 API.
138 * The "git apply" standalone program is being libified; this is the
139 first step to move many state variables into a structure that can
140 be explicitly (re)initialized to make the machinery callable more
141 than once.
143 * HTTP transport gained an option to produce more detailed debugging
144 trace.
145 (merge 73e57aa ep/http-curl-trace later to maint).
147 * Instead of taking advantage of a struct string_list that is
148 allocated with all NULs happens to be STRING_LIST_INIT_NODUP kind,
149 initialize them explicitly as such, to document their behaviour
150 better.
151 (merge 2721ce2 jk/string-list-static-init later to maint).
153 * HTTPd tests learned to show the server error log to help diagnosing
154 a failing tests.
155 (merge 44f243d nd/test-lib-httpd-show-error-log-in-verbose later to maint).
157 * The ownership rule for the piece of memory that hold references to
158 be fetched in "git fetch" was screwy, which has been cleaned up.
160 * "git bisect" makes an internal call to "git diff-tree" when
161 bisection finds the culprit, but this call did not initialize the
162 data structure to pass to the diff-tree API correctly.
164 * Further preparatory clean-up for "worktree" feature continues.
165 (merge 0409e0b nd/worktree-cleanup-post-head-protection later to maint).
167 * Formats of the various data (and how to validate them) where we use
168 GPG signature have been documented.
170 * A new run-command API function pipe_command() is introduced to
171 sanely feed data to the standard input while capturing data from
172 the standard output and the standard error of an external process,
173 which is cumbersome to hand-roll correctly without deadlocking.
175 The codepath to sign data in a prepared buffer with GPG has been
176 updated to use this API to read from the status-fd to check for
177 errors (instead of relying on GPG's exit status).
178 (merge efee955 jk/gpg-interface-cleanup later to maint).
180 * Allow t/perf framework to use the features from the most recent
181 version of Git even when testing an older installed version.
183 * The commands in the "log/diff" family have had an FILE* pointer in the
184 data structure they pass around for a long time, but some codepaths
185 used to always write to the standard output. As a preparatory step
186 to make "git format-patch" available to the internal callers, these
187 codepaths have been updated to consistently write into that FILE*
188 instead.
190 * Conversion from unsigned char sha1[20] to struct object_id
191 continues.
193 * Improve the look of the way "git fetch" reports what happened to
194 each ref that was fetched.
196 * The .c/.h sources are marked as such in our .gitattributes file so
197 that "git diff -W" and friends would work better.
199 * Code clean-up to avoid using a variable string that compilers may
200 feel untrustable as printf-style format given to write_file()
201 helper function.
203 * "git p4" used a location outside $GIT_DIR/refs/ to place its
204 temporary branches, which has been moved to refs/git-p4-tmp/.
206 * Existing autoconf generated test for the need to link with pthread
207 library did not check all the functions from pthread libraries;
208 recent FreeBSD has some functions in libc but not others, and we
209 mistakenly thought linking with libc is enough when it is not.
211 * When "git fsck" reports a broken link (e.g. a tree object contains
212 a blob that does not exist), both containing object and the object
213 that is referred to were reported with their 40-hex object names.
214 The command learned the "--name-objects" option to show the path to
215 the containing object from existing refs (e.g. "HEAD~24^2:file.txt").
217 * Allow http daemon tests in Travis CI tests.
219 * Makefile assumed that -lrt is always available on platforms that
220 want to use clock_gettime() and CLOCK_MONOTONIC, which is not a
221 case for recent Mac OS X. The necessary symbols are often found in
222 libc on many modern systems and having -lrt on the command line, as
223 long as the library exists, had no effect, but when the platform
224 removes librt.a that is a different matter--having -lrt will break
225 the linkage.
227 This change could be seen as a regression for those who do need to
228 specify -lrt, as they now specifically ask for NEEDS_LIBRT when
229 building. Hopefully they are in the minority these days.
231 * Further preparatory work on the refs API before the pluggable
232 backend series can land.
234 * Error handling in the codepaths that updates refs has been
235 improved.
237 * The API to iterate over all the refs (i.e. for_each_ref(), etc.)
238 has been revamped.
240 * A few tests that specifically target "git rebase -i" have been
241 added.
243 * Dumb http transport on the client side has been optimized.
244 (merge ecba195 ew/http-walker later to maint).
246 * Users of the parse_options_concat() API function need to allocate
247 extra slots in advance and fill them with OPT_END() when they want
248 to decide the set of supported options dynamically, which makes the
249 code error-prone and hard to read. This has been corrected by tweaking
250 the API to allocate and return a new copy of "struct option" array.
252 * "git fetch" exchanges batched have/ack messages between the sender
253 and the receiver, initially doubling every time and then falling
254 back to enlarge the window size linearly. The "smart http"
255 transport, being an half-duplex protocol, outgrows the preset limit
256 too quickly and becomes inefficient when interacting with a large
257 repository. The internal mechanism learned to grow the window size
258 more aggressively when working with the "smart http" transport.
260 * Tests for "git svn" have been taught to reuse the lib-httpd test
261 infrastructure when testing the subversion integration that
262 interacts with subversion repositories served over the http://
263 protocol.
264 (merge a8a5d25 ew/git-svn-http-tests later to maint).
266 * "git pack-objects" has a few options that tell it not to pack
267 objects found in certain packfiles, which require it to scan .idx
268 files of all available packs. The codepaths involved in these
269 operations have been optimized for a common case of not having any
270 non-local pack and/or any .kept pack.
272 * The t3700 test about "add --chmod=-x" have been made a bit more
273 robust and generally cleaned up.
274 (merge 766cdc4 ib/t3700-add-chmod-x-updates later to maint).
276 * The build procedure learned PAGER_ENV knob that lists what default
277 environment variable settings to export for popular pagers. This
278 mechanism is used to tweak the default settings to MORE on FreeBSD.
279 (merge 995bc22 ew/build-time-pager-tweaks later to maint).
281 * The http-backend (the server-side component of smart-http
282 transport) used to trickle the HTTP header one at a time. Now
283 these write(2)s are batched.
284 (merge b36045c ew/http-backend-batch-headers later to maint).
286 * When "git rebase" tries to compare set of changes on the updated
287 upstream and our own branch, it computes patch-id for all of these
288 changes and attempts to find matches. This has been optimized by
289 lazily computing the full patch-id (which is expensive) to be
290 compared only for changes that touch the same set of paths.
291 (merge b3dfeeb kw/patch-ids-optim later to maint).
294 Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
297 Fixes since v2.9
298 ----------------
300 Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.8 in the maintenance
301 track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases'
302 notes for details).
304 * The commands in `git log` family take %C(auto) in a custom format
305 string. This unconditionally turned the color on, ignoring
306 --no-color or with --color=auto when the output is not connected to
307 a tty; this was corrected to make the format truly behave as
308 "auto".
310 * "git rev-list --count" whose walk-length is limited with "-n"
311 option did not work well with the counting optimized to look at the
312 bitmap index.
314 * "git show -W" (extend hunks to cover the entire function, delimited
315 by lines that match the "funcname" pattern) used to show the entire
316 file when a change added an entire function at the end of the file,
317 which has been fixed.
319 * The documentation set has been updated so that literal commands,
320 configuration variables and environment variables are consistently
321 typeset in fixed-width font and bold in manpages.
323 * "git svn propset" subcommand that was added in 2.3 days is
324 documented now.
326 * The documentation tries to consistently spell "GPG"; when
327 referring to the specific program name, "gpg" is used.
329 * "git reflog" stopped upon seeing an entry that denotes a branch
330 creation event (aka "unborn"), which made it appear as if the
331 reflog was truncated.
333 * The git-prompt scriptlet (in contrib/) was not friendly with those
334 who uses "set -u", which has been fixed.
336 * compat/regex code did not cleanly compile.
338 * A codepath that used alloca(3) to place an unbounded amount of data
339 on the stack has been updated to avoid doing so.
341 * "git update-index --add --chmod=+x file" may be usable as an escape
342 hatch, but not a friendly thing to force for people who do need to
343 use it regularly. "git add --chmod=+x file" can be used instead.
345 * Build improvements for gnome-keyring (in contrib/)
347 * "git status" used to say "working directory" when it meant "working
348 tree".
350 * Comments about misbehaving FreeBSD shells have been clarified with
351 the version number (9.x and before are broken, newer ones are OK).
353 * "git cherry-pick A" worked on an unborn branch, but "git
354 cherry-pick A..B" didn't.
356 * Fix an unintended regression in v2.9 that breaks "clone --depth"
357 that recurses down to submodules by forcing the submodules to also
358 be cloned shallowly, which many server instances that host upstream
359 of the submodules are not prepared for.
361 * Fix unnecessarily waste in the idiomatic use of ': ${VAR=default}'
362 to set the default value, without enclosing it in double quotes.
364 * Some platform-specific code had non-ANSI strict declarations of C
365 functions that do not take any parameters, which has been
366 corrected.
368 * The internal code used to show local timezone offset is not
369 prepared to handle timestamps beyond year 2100, and gave a
370 bogus offset value to the caller. Use a more benign looking
371 +0000 instead and let "git log" going in such a case, instead
372 of aborting.
374 * One among four invocations of readlink(1) in our test suite has
375 been rewritten so that the test can run on systems without the
376 command (others are in valgrind test framework and t9802).
378 * t/perf needs /usr/bin/time with GNU extension; the invocation of it
379 is updated to "gtime" on Darwin.
381 * A bug, which caused "git p4" while running under verbose mode to
382 report paths that are omitted due to branch prefix incorrectly, has
383 been fixed; the command said "Ignoring file outside of prefix" for
384 paths that are _inside_.
386 * The top level documentation "git help git" still pointed at the
387 documentation set hosted at now-defunct google-code repository.
388 Update it to point to https://git.github.io/htmldocs/git.html
389 instead.
391 * A helper function that takes the contents of a commit object and
392 finds its subject line did not ignore leading blank lines, as is
393 commonly done by other codepaths. Make it ignore leading blank
394 lines to match.
396 * For a long time, we carried an in-code comment that said our
397 colored output would work only when we use fprintf/fputs on
398 Windows, which no longer is the case for the past few years.
400 * "gc.autoPackLimit" when set to 1 should not trigger a repacking
401 when there is only one pack, but the code counted poorly and did
402 so.
404 * Add a test to specify the desired behaviour that currently is not
405 available in "git rebase -Xsubtree=...".
407 * More mark-up updates to typeset strings that are expected to
408 literally typed by the end user in fixed-width font.
410 * "git commit --amend --allow-empty-message -S" for a commit without
411 any message body could have misidentified where the header of the
412 commit object ends.
414 * "git rebase -i --autostash" did not restore the auto-stashed change
415 when the operation was aborted.
417 * Git does not know what the contents in the index should be for a
418 path added with "git add -N" yet, so "git grep --cached" should not
419 show hits (or show lack of hits, with -L) in such a path, but that
420 logic does not apply to "git grep", i.e. searching in the working
421 tree files. But we did so by mistake, which has been corrected.
423 * "git blame -M" missed a single line that was moved within the file.
425 * Fix recently introduced codepaths that are involved in parallel
426 submodule operations, which gave up on reading too early, and
427 could have wasted CPU while attempting to write under a corner
428 case condition.
430 * "git grep -i" has been taught to fold case in non-ascii locales
431 correctly.
433 * A test that unconditionally used "mktemp" learned that the command
434 is not necessarily available everywhere.
436 * There are certain house-keeping tasks that need to be performed at
437 the very beginning of any Git program, and programs that are not
438 built-in commands had to do them exactly the same way as "git"
439 potty does. It was easy to make mistakes in one-off standalone
440 programs (like test helpers). A common "main()" function that
441 calls cmd_main() of individual program has been introduced to
442 make it harder to make mistakes.
443 (merge de61ceb jk/common-main later to maint).
445 * The test framework learned a new helper test_match_signal to
446 check an exit code from getting killed by an expected signal.
448 * General code clean-up around a helper function to write a
449 single-liner to a file.
450 (merge 7eb6e10 jk/write-file later to maint).
452 * One part of "git am" had an oddball helper function that called
453 stuff from outside "his" as opposed to calling what we have "ours",
454 which was not gender-neutral and also inconsistent with the rest of
455 the system where outside stuff is usuall called "theirs" in
456 contrast to "ours".
458 * "git blame file" allowed the lineage of lines in the uncommitted,
459 unadded contents of "file" to be inspected, but it refused when
460 "file" did not appear in the current commit. When "file" was
461 created by renaming an existing file (but the change has not been
462 committed), this restriction was unnecessarily tight.
464 * "git add -N dir/file && git write-tree" produced an incorrect tree
465 when there are other paths in the same directory that sorts after
466 "file".
468 * "git fetch http://user:pass@host/repo..." scrubbed the userinfo
469 part, but "git push" didn't.
471 * "git merge" with renormalization did not work well with
472 merge-recursive, due to "safer crlf" conversion kicking in when it
473 shouldn't.
474 (merge 1335d76 jc/renormalize-merge-kill-safer-crlf later to maint).
476 * The use of strbuf in "git rm" to build filename to remove was a bit
477 suboptimal, which has been fixed.
479 * An age old bug that caused "git diff --ignore-space-at-eol"
480 misbehave has been fixed.
482 * "git notes merge" had a code to see if a path exists (and fails if
483 it does) and then open the path for writing (when it doesn't).
484 Replace it with open with O_EXCL.
486 * "git pack-objects" and "git index-pack" mostly operate with off_t
487 when talking about the offset of objects in a packfile, but there
488 were a handful of places that used "unsigned long" to hold that
489 value, leading to an unintended truncation.
491 * Recent update to "git daemon" tries to enable the socket-level
492 KEEPALIVE, but when it is spawned via inetd, the standard input
493 file descriptor may not necessarily be connected to a socket.
494 Suppress an ENOTSOCK error from setsockopt().
496 * Recent FreeBSD stopped making perl available at /usr/bin/perl;
497 switch the default the built-in path to /usr/local/bin/perl on not
498 too ancient FreeBSD releases.
500 * "git commit --help" said "--no-verify" is only about skipping the
501 pre-commit hook, and failed to say that it also skipped the
502 commit-msg hook.
504 * "git merge" in Git v2.9 was taught to forbid merging an unrelated
505 lines of history by default, but that is exactly the kind of thing
506 the "--rejoin" mode of "git subtree" (in contrib/) wants to do.
507 "git subtree" has been taught to use the "--allow-unrelated-histories"
508 option to override the default.
510 * The build procedure for "git persistent-https" helper (in contrib/)
511 has been updated so that it can be built with more recent versions
512 of Go.
514 * There is an optimization used in "git diff $treeA $treeB" to borrow
515 an already checked-out copy in the working tree when it is known to
516 be the same as the blob being compared, expecting that open/mmap of
517 such a file is faster than reading it from the object store, which
518 involves inflating and applying delta. This however kicked in even
519 when the checked-out copy needs to go through the convert-to-git
520 conversion (including the clean filter), which defeats the whole
521 point of the optimization. The optimization has been disabled when
522 the conversion is necessary.
524 * "git -c grep.patternType=extended log --basic-regexp" misbehaved
525 because the internal API to access the grep machinery was not
526 designed well.
528 * Windows port was failing some tests in t4130, due to the lack of
529 inum in the returned values by its lstat(2) emulation.
531 * The reflog output format is documented better, and a new format
532 --date=unix to report the seconds-since-epoch (without timezone)
533 has been added.
534 (merge 442f6fd jk/reflog-date later to maint).
536 * "git difftool <paths>..." started in a subdirectory failed to
537 interpret the paths relative to that directory, which has been
538 fixed.
540 * The characters in the label shown for tags/refs for commits in
541 "gitweb" output are now properly escaped for proper HTML output.
543 * FreeBSD can lie when asked mtime of a directory, which made the
544 untracked cache code to fall back to a slow-path, which in turn
545 caused tests in t7063 to fail because it wanted to verify the
546 behaviour of the fast-path.
548 * Squelch compiler warnings for netmalloc (in compat/) library.
550 * A small memory leak in the command line parsing of "git blame"
551 has been plugged.
553 * The API documentation for hashmap was unclear if hashmap_entry
554 can be safely discarded without any other consideration. State
555 that it is safe to do so.
557 * Not-so-recent rewrite of "git am" that started making internal
558 calls into the commit machinery had an unintended regression, in
559 that no matter how many seconds it took to apply many patches, the
560 resulting committer timestamp for the resulting commits were all
561 the same.
563 * "git push --force-with-lease" already had enough logic to allow
564 ensuring that such a push results in creation of a ref (i.e. the
565 receiving end did not have another push from sideways that would be
566 discarded by our force-pushing), but didn't expose this possibility
567 to the users. It does so now.
568 (merge 9eed4f3 jk/push-force-with-lease-creation later to maint).
570 * The mechanism to limit the pack window memory size, when packing is
571 done using multiple threads (which is the default), is per-thread,
572 but this was not documented clearly.
573 (merge 954176c ms/document-pack-window-memory-is-per-thread later to maint).
575 * "import-tars" fast-import script (in contrib/) used to ignore a
576 hardlink target and replaced it with an empty file, which has been
577 corrected to record the same blob as the other file the hardlink is
578 shared with.
579 (merge 04e0869 js/import-tars-hardlinks later to maint).
581 * "git mv dir non-existing-dir/" did not work in some environments
582 the same way as existing mainstream platforms. The code now moves
583 "dir" to "non-existing-dir", without relying on rename("A", "B/")
584 that strips the trailing slash of '/'.
585 (merge 189d035 js/mv-dir-to-new-directory later to maint).
587 * Other minor clean-ups and documentation updates
588 (merge 02a8cfa rs/merge-add-strategies-simplification later to maint).
589 (merge af4941d rs/merge-recursive-string-list-init later to maint).
590 (merge 1eb47f1 rs/use-strbuf-add-unique-abbrev later to maint).