4 Backward compatibility notes
5 ----------------------------
7 "git submodule foreach $cmd $args" used to treat "$cmd $args" the same
8 way "ssh" did, concatenating them into a single string and letting the
9 shell unquote. Careless users who forget to sufficiently quote $args
10 gets their argument split at $IFS whitespaces by the shell, and got
11 unexpected results due to this. Starting from this release, the
12 command line is passed directly to the shell, if it has an argument.
14 Read-only support for experimental loose-object format, in which users
15 could optionally choose to write in their loose objects for a short
16 while between v1.4.3 to v1.5.3 era, has been dropped.
18 The meanings of "--tags" option to "git fetch" has changed; the
19 command fetches tags _in addition to_ what are fetched by the same
20 command line without the option.
22 The way "git push $there $what" interprets $what part given on the
23 command line, when it does not have a colon that explicitly tells us
24 what ref at the $there repository is to be updated, has been enhanced.
26 A handful of ancient commands that have long been deprecated are
27 finally gone (repo-config, tar-tree, lost-found, and peek-remote).
30 Backward compatibility notes (for Git 2.0)
31 ------------------------------------------
33 When "git push [$there]" does not say what to push, we have used the
34 traditional "matching" semantics so far (all your branches were sent
35 to the remote as long as there already are branches of the same name
36 over there). In Git 2.0, the default will change to the "simple"
37 semantics, which pushes:
39 - only the current branch to the branch with the same name, and only
40 when the current branch is set to integrate with that remote
41 branch, if you are pushing to the same remote as you fetch from; or
43 - only the current branch to the branch with the same name, if you
44 are pushing to a remote that is not where you usually fetch from.
46 Use the user preference configuration variable "push.default" to
47 change this. If you are an old-timer who is used to the "matching"
48 semantics, you can set the variable to "matching" to keep the
49 traditional behaviour. If you want to live in the future early, you
50 can set it to "simple" today without waiting for Git 2.0.
52 When "git add -u" (and "git add -A") is run inside a subdirectory and
53 does not specify which paths to add on the command line, it
54 will operate on the entire tree in Git 2.0 for consistency
55 with "git commit -a" and other commands. There will be no
56 mechanism to make plain "git add -u" behave like "git add -u .".
57 Current users of "git add -u" (without a pathspec) should start
58 training their fingers to explicitly say "git add -u ."
59 before Git 2.0 comes. A warning is issued when these commands are
60 run without a pathspec and when you have local changes outside the
61 current directory, because the behaviour in Git 2.0 will be different
62 from today's version in such a situation.
64 In Git 2.0, "git add <path>" will behave as "git add -A <path>", so
65 that "git add dir/" will notice paths you removed from the directory
66 and record the removal. Versions before Git 2.0, including this
67 release, will keep ignoring removals, but the users who rely on this
68 behaviour are encouraged to start using "git add --ignore-removal <path>"
69 now before 2.0 is released.
71 The default prefix for "git svn" will change in Git 2.0. For a long
72 time, "git svn" created its remote-tracking branches directly under
73 refs/remotes, but it will place them under refs/remotes/origin/ unless
74 it is told otherwise with its --prefix option.
80 Foreign interfaces, subsystems and ports.
82 * The HTTP transport, when talking GSS-Negotiate, uses "100
83 Continue" response to avoid having to rewind and resend a large
84 payload, which may not be always doable.
86 * Various bugfixes to remote-bzr and remote-hg (in contrib/).
88 * The build procedure is aware of MirBSD now.
91 UI, Workflows & Features
93 * Two-level configuration variable names in "branch.*" and "remote.*"
94 hierarchies, whose variables are predominantly three-level, were
95 not completed by hitting a <TAB> in bash and zsh completions.
97 * Fetching 'frotz' branch with "git fetch", while 'frotz/nitfol'
98 remote-tracking branch from an earlier fetch was still there, would
99 error out, primarily because the command was not told that it is
100 allowed to lose any information on our side. "git fetch --prune"
101 now can be used to remove 'frotz/nitfol' to make room to fetch and
102 store 'frotz' remote-tracking branch.
104 * "diff.orderfile=<file>" configuration variable can be used to
105 pretend as if the "-O<file>" option were given from the command
106 line of "git diff", etc.
108 * The negative pathspec syntax allows "git log -- . ':!dir'" to tell
109 us "I am interested in everything but 'dir' directory".
111 * "git difftool" shows how many different paths there are in total,
112 and how many of them have been shown so far, to indicate progress.
114 * "git push origin master" used to push our 'master' branch to update
115 the 'master' branch at the 'origin' repository. This has been
116 enhanced to use the same ref mapping "git push origin" would use to
117 determine what ref at the 'origin' to be updated with our 'master'.
118 For example, with this configuration
121 push = refs/heads/*:refs/review/*
123 that would cause "git push origin" to push out our local branches
124 to corresponding refs under refs/review/ hierarchy at 'origin',
125 "git push origin master" would update 'refs/review/master' over
126 there. Alternatively, if push.default is set to 'upstream' and our
127 'master' is set to integrate with 'topic' from the 'origin' branch,
128 running "git push origin" while on our 'master' would update their
129 'topic' branch, and running "git push origin master" while on any
130 of our branches does the same.
132 * "gitweb" learned to treat ref hierarchies other than refs/heads as
133 if they are additional branch namespaces (e.g. refs/changes/ in
136 * "git for-each-ref --format=..." learned a few formatting directives;
137 e.g. "%(color:red)%(HEAD)%(color:reset) %(refname:short) %(subject)".
139 * The command string given to "git submodule foreach" is passed
140 directly to the shell, without being eval'ed. This is a backward
141 incompatible change that may break existing users.
143 * "git log" and friends learned the "--exclude=<glob>" option, to
144 allow people to say "list history of all branches except those that
145 match this pattern" with "git log --exclude='*/*' --branches".
147 * "git rev-parse --parseopt" learned a new "--stuck-long" option to
148 help scripts parse options with an optional parameter.
150 * The "--tags" option to "git fetch" no longer tells the command to
151 fetch _only_ the tags. It instead fetches tags _in addition to_
152 what are fetched by the same command line without the option.
155 Performance, Internal Implementation, etc.
157 * The naming convention of the packfiles has been updated; it used to
158 be based on the enumeration of names of the objects that are
159 contained in the pack, but now it also depends on how the packed
160 result is represented---packing the same set of objects using
161 different settings (or delta order) would produce a pack with
164 * "git diff --no-index" mode used to unnecessarily attempt to read
165 the index when there is one.
167 * The deprecated parse-options macro OPT_BOOLEAN has been removed;
168 use OPT_BOOL or OPT_COUNTUP in new code.
170 * A few duplicate implementations of prefix/suffix string comparison
171 functions have been unified to starts_with() and ends_with().
173 * The new PERLLIB_EXTRA makefile variable can be used to specify
174 additional directories Perl modules (e.g. the ones necessary to run
175 git-svn) are installed on the platform when building.
177 * "git merge-base" learned the "--fork-point" mode, that implements
178 the same logic used in "git pull --rebase" to find a suitable fork
179 point out of the reflog entries for the remote-tracking branch the
180 work has been based on. "git rebase" has the same logic that can be
181 triggered with the "--fork-point" option.
183 * A third-party "receive-pack" (the responder to "git push") can
184 advertise the "no-thin" capability to tell "git push" not to use
185 the thin-pack optimization. Our receive-pack has always been
186 capable of accepting and fattening a thin-pack, and will continue
187 not to ask "git push" to use a non-thin pack.
190 Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
196 Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v1.8.5 in the maintenance
197 track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases' notes
200 * The "--[no-]informative-errors" options to "git daemon" were parsed
201 a bit too loosely, allowing any other string after these option
203 (merge 82246b7 nd/daemon-informative-errors-typofix later to maint).
205 * There is no reason to have a hardcoded upper limit of the number of
206 parents for an octopus merge, created via the graft mechanism, but
208 (merge e228c17 js/lift-parent-count-limit later to maint).
210 * The basic test used to leave unnecessary trash directories in the
212 (merge 738a8be jk/test-framework-updates later to maint).
214 * "git merge-base --octopus" used to leave cleaning up suboptimal
215 result to the caller, but now it does the clean-up itself.
216 (merge 8f29299 bm/merge-base-octopus-dedup later to maint).
218 * A "gc" process running as a different user should be able to stop a
219 new "gc" process from starting, but it didn't.
220 (merge ed7eda8 km/gc-eperm later to maint).
222 * An earlier "clean-up" introduced an unnecessary memory leak.
223 (merge e1c1a32 jk/credential-plug-leak later to maint).
225 * "git add -A" (no other arguments) in a totally empty working tree
226 used to emit an error.
227 (merge 64ed07c nd/add-empty-fix later to maint).
229 * "git log --decorate" did not handle a tag pointed by another tag
231 (merge 5e1361c bc/log-decoration later to maint).
233 * When we figure out how many file descriptors to allocate for
234 keeping packfiles open, a system with non-working getrlimit() could
235 cause us to die(), but because we make this call only to get a
236 rough estimate of how many is available and we do not even attempt
237 to use up all file descriptors available ourselves, it is nicer to
238 fall back to a reasonable low value rather than dying.
239 (merge 491a8de jh/rlimit-nofile-fallback later to maint).
241 * read_sha1_file(), that is the workhorse to read the contents given
242 an object name, honoured object replacements, but there was no
243 corresponding mechanism to sha1_object_info() that was used to
244 obtain the metainfo (e.g. type & size) about the object. This led
245 callers to weird inconsistencies.
246 (merge 663a856 cc/replace-object-info later to maint).
248 * "git cat-file --batch=", an admittedly useless command, did not
250 (merge 6554dfa jk/cat-file-regression-fix later to maint).
252 * "git rev-parse <revs> -- <paths>" did not implement the usual
253 disambiguation rules the commands in the "git log" family used in
255 (merge 62f162f jk/rev-parse-double-dashes later to maint).
257 * "git mv A B/", when B does not exist as a directory, should error
259 (merge c57f628 mm/mv-file-to-no-such-dir-with-slash later to maint).
261 * A workaround to an old bug in glibc prior to glibc 2.17 has been
262 retired; this would remove a side effect of the workaround that
263 corrupts system error messages in non-C locales.
265 * SSL-related options were not passed correctly to underlying socket
266 layer in "git send-email".
267 (merge 5508f3e tr/send-email-ssl later to maint).
269 * "git commit -v" appends the patch to the log message before
270 editing, and then removes the patch when the editor returned
271 control. However, the patch was not stripped correctly when the
272 first modified path was a submodule.
273 (merge 1a72cfd jl/commit-v-strip-marker later to maint).
275 * "git fetch --depth=0" was a no-op, and was silently ignored.
276 Diagnose it as an error.
277 (merge 5594bca nd/transport-positive-depth-only later to maint).
279 * Remote repository URL expressed in scp-style host:path notation are
280 parsed more carefully (e.g. "foo/bar:baz" is local, "[::1]:/~user" asks
281 to connect to user's home directory on host at address ::1.
282 (merge a2036d7 tb/clone-ssh-with-colon-for-port later to maint).
284 * "git diff -- ':(icase)makefile'" was unnecessarily rejected at the
286 (merge 887c6c1 nd/magic-pathspec later to maint).
288 * "git cat-file --batch-check=ok" did not check the existence of
290 (merge 4ef8d1d sb/sha1-loose-object-info-check-existence later to maint).
292 * "git am --abort" sometimes complained about not being able to write
293 a tree with an 0{40} object in it.
294 (merge 77b43ca jk/two-way-merge-corner-case-fix later to maint).
296 * Two processes creating loose objects at the same time could have
297 failed unnecessarily when the name of their new objects started
298 with the same byte value, due to a race condition.
299 (merge b2476a6 jh/loose-object-dirs-creation-race later to maint).