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 * Git now avoids blindly falling back to ".git" when the setup
15 sequence said we are _not_ in Git repository. A corner case that
16 happens to work right now may be broken by a call to die("BUG").
17 We've tried hard to locate such cases and fixed them, but there
18 might still be cases that need to be addressed--bug reports are
21 * The experiment to improve the hunk-boundary selection of textual
22 diff output has finished, and the "indent heuristics" has now
29 UI, Workflows & Features
31 * The colors in which "git status --short --branch" showed the names
32 of the current branch and its remote-tracking branch are now
35 * "git clone" learned the "--no-tags" option not to fetch all tags
36 initially, and also set up the tagopt not to follow any tags in
39 * "git archive --format=zip" learned to use zip64 extension when
40 necessary to go beyond the 4GB limit.
42 * "git reset" learned "--recurse-submodules" option.
44 * "git diff --submodule=diff" now recurses into nested submodules.
46 * "git repack" learned to accept the --threads=<n> option and pass it
49 * "git send-email" learned to run sendemail-validate hook to inspect
50 and reject a message before sending it out.
52 * There is no good reason why "git fetch $there $sha1" should fail
53 when the $sha1 names an object at the tip of an advertised ref,
54 even when the other side hasn't enabled allowTipSHA1InWant.
56 * The recently introduced "[includeIf "gitdir:$dir"] path=..."
57 mechanism has further been taught to take symlinks into account.
58 The directory "$dir" specified in "gitdir:$dir" may be a symlink to
59 a real location, not something that $(getcwd) may return. In such
60 a case, a realpath of "$dir" is compared with the real path of the
61 current repository to determine if the contents from the named path
64 * Make the "indent" heuristics the default in "diff" and diff.indentHeuristics
65 configuration variable an escape hatch for those who do no want it.
67 * Many commands learned to pay attention to submodule.recurse
70 * The convention for a command line is to follow "git cmdname
71 --options" with revisions followed by an optional "--"
72 disambiguator and then finally pathspecs. When "--" is not there,
73 we make sure early ones are all interpretable as revs (and do not
74 look like paths) and later ones are the other way around. A
75 pathspec with "magic" (e.g. ":/p/a/t/h" that matches p/a/t/h from
76 the top-level of the working tree, no matter what subdirectory you
77 are working from) are conservatively judged as "not a path", which
78 required disambiguation more often. The command line parser
79 learned to say "it's a pathspec" a bit more often when the syntax
82 * Update "perl-compatible regular expression" support to enable JIT
83 and also allow linking with the newer PCRE v2 library.
85 * "filter-branch" learned a pseudo filter "--setup" that can be used
86 to define common functions/variables that can be used by other
89 * Using "git add d/i/r" when d/i/r is the top of the working tree of
90 a separate repository would create a gitlink in the index, which
91 would appear as a not-quite-initialized submodule to others. We
92 learned to give warnings when this happens.
94 * "git status" learned to optionally give how many stash entries the
95 user has in its output.
97 * "git status" has long shown essentially the same message as "git
98 commit"; the message it gives while preparing for the root commit,
99 i.e. "Initial commit", was hard to understand for some new users.
100 Now it says "No commits yet" to stress more on the current status
101 (rather than the commit the user is preparing for, which is more in
102 line with the focus of "git commit").
104 * "git send-email" learned to overcome some SMTP server limitation
105 that does not allow many pieces of e-mails to be sent over a single
108 * An old message shown in the commit log template was removed, as it
109 has outlived its usefulness.
112 Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.
114 * The default packed-git limit value has been raised on larger
115 platforms to save "git fetch" from a (recoverable) failure while
116 "gc" is running in parallel.
118 * Code to update the cache-tree has been tightened so that we won't
119 accidentally write out any 0{40} entry in the tree object.
121 * Attempt to allow us notice "fishy" situation where we fail to
122 remove the temporary directory used during the test.
124 * Travis CI gained a task to format the documentation with both
125 AsciiDoc and AsciiDoctor.
127 * Some platforms have ulong that is smaller than time_t, and our
128 historical use of ulong for timestamp would mean they cannot
129 represent some timestamp that the platform allows. Invent a
130 separate and dedicated timestamp_t (so that we can distingiuish
131 timestamps and a vanilla ulongs, which along is already a good
132 move), and then declare uintmax_t is the type to be used as the
135 * We can trigger Windows auto-build tester (credits: Dscho &
136 Microsoft) from our existing Travis CI tester now.
138 * Conversion from uchar[20] to struct object_id continues.
140 * Simplify parse_pathspec() codepath and stop it from looking at the
141 default in-core index.
143 * Add perf-test for wildmatch.
145 * Code from "conversion using external process" codepath has been
146 extracted to a separate sub-process.[ch] module.
148 * When "git checkout", "git merge", etc. manipulates the in-core
149 index, various pieces of information in the index extensions are
150 discarded from the original state, as it is usually not the case
151 that they are kept up-to-date and in-sync with the operation on the
152 main index. The untracked cache extension is copied across these
153 operations now, which would speed up "git status" (as long as the
154 cache is properly invalidated).
156 * The internal implementation of "git grep" has seen some clean-up.
158 * Update the C style recommendation for notes for translators, as
159 recent versions of gettext tools can work with our style of
162 * The implementation of "ref" API around the "packed refs" have been
163 cleaned up, in preparation for further changes.
165 * The internal logic used in "git blame" has been libified to make it
166 easier to use by cgit.
168 * Our code often opens a path to an optional file, to work on its
169 contents when we can successfully open it. We can ignore a failure
170 to open if such an optional file does not exist, but we do want to
171 report a failure in opening for other reasons (e.g. we got an I/O
172 error, or the file is there, but we lack the permission to open).
174 The exact errors we need to ignore are ENOENT (obviously) and
175 ENOTDIR (less obvious). Instead of repeating comparison of errno
176 with these two constants, introduce a helper function to do so.
178 * We often try to open a file for reading whose existence is
179 optional, and silently ignore errors from open/fopen; report such
180 errors if they are not due to missing files.
182 * When an existing repository is used for t/perf testing, we first
183 create bit-for-bit copy of it, which may grab a transient state of
184 the repository and freeze it into the repository used for testing,
185 which then may cause Git operations to fail. Single out "the index
186 being locked" case and forcibly drop the lock from the copy.
188 * Three instances of the same helper function have been consolidated
191 * "fast-import" uses a default pack chain depth that is consistent
192 with other parts of the system.
194 * A new test to show the interaction between the pattern [^a-z]
195 (which matches '/') and a slash in a path has been added. The
196 pattern should not match the slash with "pathmatch", but should
199 * The 'diff-highlight' program (in contrib/) has been restructured
200 for easier reuse by an external project 'diff-so-fancy'.
202 * A common pattern to free a piece of memory and assign NULL to the
203 pointer that used to point at it has been replaced with a new
204 FREE_AND_NULL() macro.
206 * Traditionally, the default die() routine had a code to prevent it
207 from getting called multiple times, which interacted badly when a
208 threaded program used it (one downside is that the real error may
209 be hidden and instead the only error message given to the user may
210 end up being "die recursion detected", which is not very useful).
212 * Introduce a "repository" object to eventually make it easier to
213 work in multiple repositories (the primary focus is to work with
214 the superproject and its submodules) in a single process.
216 * Optimize "what are the object names already taken in an alternate
217 object database?" query that is used to derive the length of prefix
218 an object name is uniquely abbreviated to.
221 Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
227 Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.13 in the maintenance
228 track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases'
231 * "git gc" did not interact well with "git worktree"-managed
234 * "git cherry-pick" and other uses of the sequencer machinery
235 mishandled a trailer block whose last line is an incomplete line.
236 This has been fixed so that an additional sign-off etc. are added
237 after completing the existing incomplete line.
239 * The codepath in "git am" that is used when running "git rebase"
240 leaked memory held for the log message of the commits being rebased.
242 * "git clone --config var=val" is a way to populate the
243 per-repository configuration file of the new repository, but it did
244 not work well when val is an empty string. This has been fixed.
246 * Setting "log.decorate=false" in the configuration file did not take
247 effect in v2.13, which has been corrected.
249 * A few codepaths in "checkout" and "am" working on an unborn branch
250 tried to access an uninitialized piece of memory.
252 * The Web interface to gmane news archive is long gone, even though
253 the articles are still accessible via NTTP. Replace the links with
254 ones to public-inbox.org. Because their message identification is
255 based on the actual message-id, it is likely that it will be easier
256 to migrate away from it if/when necessary.
258 * The receive-pack program now makes sure that the push certificate
259 records the same set of push options used for pushing.
261 * Tests have been updated to pass under GETTEXT_POISON (a mechanism
262 to ensure that output strings that should not be translated are
263 not translated by mistake), and TravisCI is told to run them.
265 * "git checkout --recurse-submodules" did not quite work with a
266 submodule that itself has submodules.
268 * "pack-objects" can stream a slice of an existing packfile out when
269 the pack bitmap can tell that the reachable objects are all needed
270 in the output, without inspecting individual objects. This
271 strategy however would not work well when "--local" and other
272 options are in use, and need to be disabled.
274 * Fix memory leaks pointed out by Coverity (and people).
276 * "git read-tree -m" (no tree-ish) gave a nonsense suggestion "use
277 --empty if you want to clear the index". With "-m", such a request
278 will still fail anyway, as you'd need to name at least one tree-ish
281 * Make sure our tests would pass when the sources are checked out
282 with "platform native" line ending convention by default on
283 Windows. Some "text" files out tests use and the test scripts
284 themselves that are meant to be run with /bin/sh, ought to be
285 checked out with eol=LF even on Windows.
287 * Introduce the BUG() macro to improve die("BUG: ...").
289 * Clarify documentation for include.path and includeIf.<condition>.path
290 configuration variables.
292 * Git sometimes gives an advice in a rhetorical question that does
293 not require an answer, which can confuse new users and non native
294 speakers. Attempt to rephrase them.
296 * A few http:// links that are redirected to https:// in the
297 documentation have been updated to https:// links.
299 * "git for-each-ref --format=..." with %(HEAD) in the format used to
300 resolve the HEAD symref as many times as it had processed refs,
301 which was wasteful, and "git branch" shared the same problem.
303 * Regression fix to topic recently merged to 'master'.
305 * The shell completion script (in contrib/) learned "git stash" has
306 a new "push" subcommand.
308 * "git interpret-trailers", when used as GIT_EDITOR for "git commit
309 -v", looked for and appended to a trailer block at the very end,
310 i.e. at the end of the "diff" output. The command has been
311 corrected to pay attention to the cut-mark line "commit -v" adds to
312 the buffer---the real trailer block should appear just before it.
314 * A test allowed both "git push" and "git receive-pack" on the other
315 end write their traces into the same file. This is OK on platforms
316 that allows atomically appending to a file opened with O_APPEND,
317 but on other platforms led to a mangled output, causing
318 intermittent test failures. This has been fixed by disabling
319 traces from "receive-pack" in the test.
321 * Tag objects, which are not reachable from any ref, that point at
322 missing objects were mishandled by "git gc" and friends (they
323 should silently be ignored instead)
325 * "git describe --contains" penalized light-weight tags so much that
326 they were almost never considered. Instead, give them about the
327 same chance to be considered as an annotated tag that is the same
328 age as the underlying commit would.
330 * The "run-command" API implementation has been made more robust
331 against dead-locking in a threaded environment.
333 * A recent update to t5545-push-options.sh started skipping all the
334 tests in the script when a web server testing is disabled or
335 unavailable, not just the ones that require a web server. Non HTTP
336 tests have been salvaged to always run in this script.
338 * "git send-email" now uses Net::SMTP::SSL, which is obsolete, only
339 when needed. Recent versions of Net::SMTP can do TLS natively.
341 * "foo\bar\baz" in "git fetch foo\bar\baz", even though there is no
342 slashes in it, cannot be a nickname for a remote on Windows, as
343 that is likely to be a pathname on a local filesystem.
345 * "git clean -d" used to clean directories that has ignored files,
346 even though the command should not lose ignored ones without "-x".
347 "git status --ignored" did not list ignored and untracked files
348 without "-uall". These have been corrected.
350 * The result from "git diff" that compares two blobs, e.g. "git diff
351 $commit1:$path $commit2:$path", used to be shown with the full
352 object name as given on the command line, but it is more natural to
353 use the $path in the output and use it to look up .gitattributes.
355 * The "collision detecting" SHA-1 implementation shipped with 2.13
356 was quite broken on some big-endian platforms and/or platforms that
357 do not like unaligned fetches. Update to the upstream code which
358 has already fixed these issues.
360 * "git am -h" triggered a BUG().
362 * The interaction of "url.*.insteadOf" and custom URL scheme's
363 whitelisting is now documented better.
365 * The timestamp of the index file is now taken after the file is
366 closed, to help Windows, on which a stale timestamp is reported by
367 fstat() on a file that is opened for writing and data was written
370 * "git pull --rebase --autostash" didn't auto-stash when the local history
371 fast-forwards to the upstream.
373 * A flaky test has been corrected.
375 * "git $cmd -h" for builtin commands calls the implementation of the
376 command (i.e. cmd_$cmd() function) without doing any repository
377 set-up, and the commands that expect RUN_SETUP is done by the Git
378 potty needs to be prepared to show the help text without barfing.
379 (merge d691551192 jk/consistent-h later to maint).
381 * Help contributors that visit us at GitHub.
383 * "git stash push <pathspec>" did not work from a subdirectory at all.
384 Bugfix for a topic in v2.13
386 * As there is no portable way to pass timezone information to
387 strftime, some output format from "git log" and friends are
388 impossible to produce. Teach our own strbuf_addftime to replace %z
389 and %Z with caller-supplied values to help working around this.
390 (merge 6eced3ec5e rs/strbuf-addftime-zZ later to maint).
392 * "git mergetool" learned to work around a wrapper MacOS X adds
393 around underlying meld.
395 * An example in documentation that does not work in multi worktree
396 configuration has been corrected.
398 * The pretty-format specifiers like '%h', '%t', etc. had an
399 optimization that no longer works correctly. In preparation/hope
400 of getting it correctly implemented, first discard the optimization
403 * The code to pick up and execute command alias definition from the
404 configuration used to switch to the top of the working tree and
405 then come back when the expanded alias was executed, which was
406 unnecessarilyl complex. Attempt to simplify the logic by using the
407 early-config mechanism that does not chdir around.
409 * Fix configuration codepath to pay proper attention to commondir
410 that is used in multi-worktree situation, and isolate config API
411 into its own header file.
412 (merge dc8441fdb4 bw/config-h later to maint).
414 * "git add -p" were updated in 2.12 timeframe to cope with custom
415 core.commentchar but the implementation was buggy and a
416 metacharacter like $ and * did not work.
418 * A recent regression in "git rebase -i" has been fixed and tests
419 that would have caught it and others have been added.
421 * An unaligned 32-bit access in pack-bitmap code ahs been corrected.
423 * Tighten error checks for invalid "git apply" input.
425 * The split index code did not honor core.sharedrepository setting
428 * The Makefile rule in contrib/subtree for building documentation
429 learned to honour USE_ASCIIDOCTOR just like the main documentation
432 * Update the sha1dc again to fix portability glitches.
434 * Code clean-up to fix possible buffer over-reading.
435 (merge 8bc172e5f2 rs/apply-avoid-over-reading later to maint).
437 * A few tests that tried to verify the contents of push certificates
438 did not use 'git rev-parse' to formulate the line to look for in
439 the certificate correctly.
441 * Update the character width tables.
442 (merge 7560aacd7c bb/unicode-10.0 later to maint).
444 * After "git branch --move" of the currently checked out branch, the
445 code to walk the reflog of HEAD via "log -g" and friends
446 incorrectly stopped at the reflog entry that records the renaming
448 (merge e30d463d45 jk/reflog-walk-maint later to maint).
450 * The rewrite of "git branch --list" using for-each-ref's internals
451 that happened in v2.13 regressed its handling of color.branch.local;
453 (merge 5b5c9c3e19 kn/ref-filter-branch-list later to maint).
455 * Other minor doc, test and build updates and code cleanups.
456 (merge 3f9c637ec7 pw/unquote-path-in-git-pm later to maint).
457 (merge 669638fe7a ks/typofix-commit-c-comment later to maint).
458 (merge 5053313562 rs/urlmatch-cleanup later to maint).
459 (merge 42c78a216e rs/use-div-round-up later to maint).
460 (merge 5e8d2729ae rs/wt-status-cleanup later to maint).
461 (merge 01826066b0 ks/fix-rebase-doc-picture later to maint).