Documentation/RelNotes/1.9.txt

   1 Git v1.9 Release Notes
   2 ======================
   3
   4 Backward compatibility notes
   5 ----------------------------
   6
   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.
  13
  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.
  17
  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.
  21
  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 $there repository is to be updated, has been enhanced.
  25
  26 A handful of ancient commands that have long been deprecated are
  27 finally gone (repo-config, tar-tree, lost-found, and peek-remote).
  28
  29
  30 Backward compatibility notes (for Git 2.0)
  31 ------------------------------------------
  32
  33 When "git push [$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:
  38
  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
  42
  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.
  45
  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.
  51
  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.
  63
  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.
  70
  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.
  75
  76
  77 Updates since v1.8.5
  78 --------------------
  79
  80 Foreign interfaces, subsystems and ports.
  81
  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.
  85
  86  * Various bugfixes to remote-bzr and remote-hg (in contrib/).
  87
  88  * The build procedure is aware of MirBSD now.
  89
  90
  91 UI, Workflows & Features
  92
  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.
  96
  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.
 103
 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.
 107
 108  * The negative pathspec syntax allows "git log -- . ':!dir'" to tell
 109    us "I am interested in everything but 'dir' directory".
 110
 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.
 113
 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
 119
 120    [remote "origin"]
 121       push = refs/heads/*:refs/review/*
 122
 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.
 131
 132  * "gitweb" learned to treat ref hierarchies other than refs/heads as
 133    if they are additional branch namespaces (e.g. refs/changes/ in
 134    Gerrit).
 135
 136  * "git for-each-ref --format=..." learned a few formatting directives;
 137    e.g. "%(color:red)%(HEAD)%(color:reset) %(refname:short) %(subject)".
 138
 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.
 142
 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".
 146
 147  * "git rev-parse --parseopt" learned a new "--stuck-long" option to
 148    help scripts parse options with an optional parameter.
 149
 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.
 153
 154
 155 Performance, Internal Implementation, etc.
 156
 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
 162    different name.
 163
 164  * "git diff --no-index" mode used to unnecessarily attempt to read
 165    the index when there is one.
 166
 167  * The deprecated parse-options macro OPT_BOOLEAN has been removed;
 168    use OPT_BOOL or OPT_COUNTUP in new code.
 169
 170  * A few duplicate implementations of prefix/suffix string comparison
 171    functions have been unified to starts_with() and ends_with().
 172
 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.
 176
 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.
 182
 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.
 188
 189
 190 Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
 191
 192
 193 Fixes since v1.8.5
 194 ------------------
 195
 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
 198 for details).
 199
 200  * The "--[no-]informative-errors" options to "git daemon" were parsed
 201    a bit too loosely, allowing any other string after these option
 202    names.
 203    (merge 82246b7 nd/daemon-informative-errors-typofix later to maint).
 204
 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
 207    there was.
 208    (merge e228c17 js/lift-parent-count-limit later to maint).
 209
 210  * The basic test used to leave unnecessary trash directories in the
 211    t/ directory.
 212    (merge 738a8be jk/test-framework-updates later to maint).
 213
 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).
 217
 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).
 221
 222  * An earlier "clean-up" introduced an unnecessary memory leak.
 223    (merge e1c1a32 jk/credential-plug-leak later to maint).
 224
 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).
 228
 229  * "git log --decorate" did not handle a tag pointed by another tag
 230    nicely.
 231    (merge 5e1361c bc/log-decoration later to maint).
 232
 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).
 240
 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).
 247
 248  * "git cat-file --batch=", an admittedly useless command, did not
 249    behave very well.
 250    (merge 6554dfa jk/cat-file-regression-fix later to maint).
 251
 252  * "git rev-parse <revs> -- <paths>" did not implement the usual
 253    disambiguation rules the commands in the "git log" family used in
 254    the same way.
 255    (merge 62f162f jk/rev-parse-double-dashes later to maint).
 256
 257  * "git mv A B/", when B does not exist as a directory, should error
 258    out, but it didn't.
 259    (merge c57f628 mm/mv-file-to-no-such-dir-with-slash later to maint).
 260
 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.
 264
 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).
 268
 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).
 274
 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).
 278
 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).
 283
 284  * "git diff -- ':(icase)makefile'" was unnecessarily rejected at the
 285    command line parser.
 286    (merge 887c6c1 nd/magic-pathspec later to maint).
 287
 288  * "git cat-file --batch-check=ok" did not check the existence of
 289    the named object.
 290    (merge 4ef8d1d sb/sha1-loose-object-info-check-existence later to maint).
 291
 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).
 295
 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).