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Twelfth batch for 2.14
[thirdparty/git.git] / Documentation / RelNotes / 2.14.0.txt
1 Git 2.14 Release Notes
2 ======================
3
4 Backward compatibility notes.
5
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
12 release (yet).
13
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
19 greatly appreciated.
20
21 * The experiment to improve the hunk-boundary selection of textual
22 diff output has finished, and the "indent heuristics" has now
23 become the default.
24
25
26 Updates since v2.13
27 -------------------
28
29 UI, Workflows & Features
30
31 * The colors in which "git status --short --branch" showed the names
32 of the current branch and its remote-tracking branch are now
33 configurable.
34
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
37 subsequent fetches.
38
39 * "git archive --format=zip" learned to use zip64 extension when
40 necessary to go beyond the 4GB limit.
41
42 * "git reset" learned "--recurse-submodules" option.
43
44 * "git diff --submodule=diff" now recurses into nested submodules.
45
46 * "git repack" learned to accept the --threads=<n> option and pass it
47 to pack-objects.
48
49 * "git send-email" learned to run sendemail-validate hook to inspect
50 and reject a message before sending it out.
51
52 * There is no good reason why "git fetch $there $sha1" should fail
53 when the $sha1 names an object at the tip of an advertised ref,
54 even when the other side hasn't enabled allowTipSHA1InWant.
55
56 * The recently introduced "[includeIf "gitdir:$dir"] path=..."
57 mechansim 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
62 should be included.
63
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.
66
67 * Many commands learned to pay attention to submodule.recurse
68 configuration.
69
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
80 looks like so.
81
82 * Update "perl-compatible regular expression" support to enable JIT
83 and also allow linking with the newer PCRE v2 library.
84
85 * "filter-branch" learned a pseudo filter "--setup" that can be used
86 to define common functions/variables that can be used by other
87 filters.
88
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.
93
94 * "git status" learned to optionally give how many stash entries the
95 user has in its output.
96
97
98 Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.
99
100 * The default packed-git limit value has been raised on larger
101 platforms to save "git fetch" from a (recoverable) failure while
102 "gc" is running in parallel.
103
104 * Code to update the cache-tree has been tightened so that we won't
105 accidentally write out any 0{40} entry in the tree object.
106
107 * Attempt to allow us notice "fishy" situation where we fail to
108 remove the temporary directory used during the test.
109
110 * Travis CI gained a task to format the documentation with both
111 AsciiDoc and AsciiDoctor.
112
113 * Some platforms have ulong that is smaller than time_t, and our
114 historical use of ulong for timestamp would mean they cannot
115 represent some timestamp that the platform allows. Invent a
116 separate and dedicated timestamp_t (so that we can distingiuish
117 timestamps and a vanilla ulongs, which along is already a good
118 move), and then declare uintmax_t is the type to be used as the
119 timestamp_t.
120
121 * We can trigger Windows auto-build tester (credits: Dscho &
122 Microsoft) from our existing Travis CI tester now.
123
124 * Conversion from uchar[20] to struct object_id continues.
125
126 * Simplify parse_pathspec() codepath and stop it from looking at the
127 default in-core index.
128
129 * Add perf-test for wildmatch.
130
131 * Code from "conversion using external process" codepath has been
132 extracted to a separate sub-process.[ch] module.
133
134 * When "git checkout", "git merge", etc. manipulates the in-core
135 index, various pieces of information in the index extensions are
136 discarded from the original state, as it is usually not the case
137 that they are kept up-to-date and in-sync with the operation on the
138 main index. The untracked cache extension is copied across these
139 operations now, which would speed up "git status" (as long as the
140 cache is properly invalidated).
141
142 * The internal implementation of "git grep" has seen some clean-up.
143
144 * Update the C style recommendation for notes for translators, as
145 recent versions of gettext tools can work with our style of
146 multi-line comments.
147
148 * The implementation of "ref" API around the "packed refs" have been
149 cleaned up, in preparation for further changes.
150
151 * The internal logic used in "git blame" has been libified to make it
152 easier to use by cgit.
153
154 * Our code often opens a path to an optional file, to work on its
155 contents when we can successfully open it. We can ignore a failure
156 to open if such an optional file does not exist, but we do want to
157 report a failure in opening for other reasons (e.g. we got an I/O
158 error, or the file is there, but we lack the permission to open).
159
160 The exact errors we need to ignore are ENOENT (obviously) and
161 ENOTDIR (less obvious). Instead of repeating comparison of errno
162 with these two constants, introduce a helper function to do so.
163
164 * We often try to open a file for reading whose existence is
165 optional, and silently ignore errors from open/fopen; report such
166 errors if they are not due to missing files.
167
168 * When an existing repository is used for t/perf testing, we first
169 create bit-for-bit copy of it, which may grab a transient state of
170 the repository and freeze it into the repository used for testing,
171 which then may cause Git operations to fail. Single out "the index
172 being locked" case and forcibly drop the lock from the copy.
173
174 * Three instances of the same helper function have been consolidated
175 to one.
176
177 * "fast-import" uses a default pack chain depth that is consistent
178 with other parts of the system.
179
180 * A new test to show the interaction between the pattern [^a-z]
181 (which matches '/') and a slash in a path has been added. The
182 pattern should not match the slash with "pathmatch", but should
183 with "wildmatch".
184
185 * The 'diff-highlight' program (in contrib/) has been restructured
186 for easier reuse by an external project 'diff-so-fancy'.
187 (merge 0c977dbc81 jk/diff-highlight-module later to maint).
188
189 * A common pattern to free a piece of memory and assign NULL to the
190 pointer that used to point at it has been replaced with a new
191 FREE_AND_NULL() macro.
192
193
194 Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
195
196
197 Fixes since v2.13
198 -----------------
199
200 Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.13 in the maintenance
201 track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases'
202 notes for details).
203
204 * "git gc" did not interact well with "git worktree"-managed
205 per-worktree refs.
206
207 * "git cherry-pick" and other uses of the sequencer machinery
208 mishandled a trailer block whose last line is an incomplete line.
209 This has been fixed so that an additional sign-off etc. are added
210 after completing the existing incomplete line.
211
212 * The codepath in "git am" that is used when running "git rebase"
213 leaked memory held for the log message of the commits being rebased.
214
215 * "git clone --config var=val" is a way to populate the
216 per-repository configuration file of the new repository, but it did
217 not work well when val is an empty string. This has been fixed.
218
219 * Setting "log.decorate=false" in the configuration file did not take
220 effect in v2.13, which has been corrected.
221
222 * A few codepaths in "checkout" and "am" working on an unborn branch
223 tried to access an uninitialized piece of memory.
224
225 * The Web interface to gmane news archive is long gone, even though
226 the articles are still accessible via NTTP. Replace the links with
227 ones to public-inbox.org. Because their message identification is
228 based on the actual message-id, it is likely that it will be easier
229 to migrate away from it if/when necessary.
230
231 * The receive-pack program now makes sure that the push certificate
232 records the same set of push options used for pushing.
233
234 * Tests have been updated to pass under GETTEXT_POISON (a mechanism
235 to ensure that output strings that should not be translated are
236 not translated by mistake), and TravisCI is told to run them.
237
238 * "git checkout --recurse-submodules" did not quite work with a
239 submodule that itself has submodules.
240
241 * "pack-objects" can stream a slice of an existing packfile out when
242 the pack bitmap can tell that the reachable objects are all needed
243 in the output, without inspecting individual objects. This
244 strategy however would not work well when "--local" and other
245 options are in use, and need to be disabled.
246
247 * Fix memory leaks pointed out by Coverity (and people).
248
249 * "git read-tree -m" (no tree-ish) gave a nonsense suggestion "use
250 --empty if you want to clear the index". With "-m", such a request
251 will still fail anyway, as you'd need to name at least one tree-ish
252 to be merged.
253
254 * Make sure our tests would pass when the sources are checked out
255 with "platform native" line ending convention by default on
256 Windows. Some "text" files out tests use and the test scripts
257 themselves that are meant to be run with /bin/sh, ought to be
258 checked out with eol=LF even on Windows.
259
260 * Introduce the BUG() macro to improve die("BUG: ...").
261
262 * Clarify documentation for include.path and includeIf.<condition>.path
263 configuration variables.
264
265 * Git sometimes gives an advice in a rhetorical question that does
266 not require an answer, which can confuse new users and non native
267 speakers. Attempt to rephrase them.
268
269 * A few http:// links that are redirected to https:// in the
270 documentation have been updated to https:// links.
271
272 * "git for-each-ref --format=..." with %(HEAD) in the format used to
273 resolve the HEAD symref as many times as it had processed refs,
274 which was wasteful, and "git branch" shared the same problem.
275
276 * Regression fix to topic recently merged to 'master'.
277
278 * The shell completion script (in contrib/) learned "git stash" has
279 a new "push" subcommand.
280
281 * "git interpret-trailers", when used as GIT_EDITOR for "git commit
282 -v", looked for and appended to a trailer block at the very end,
283 i.e. at the end of the "diff" output. The command has been
284 corrected to pay attention to the cut-mark line "commit -v" adds to
285 the buffer---the real trailer block should appear just before it.
286
287 * A test allowed both "git push" and "git receive-pack" on the other
288 end write their traces into the same file. This is OK on platforms
289 that allows atomically appending to a file opened with O_APPEND,
290 but on other platforms led to a mangled output, causing
291 intermittent test failures. This has been fixed by disabling
292 traces from "receive-pack" in the test.
293
294 * Tag objects, which are not reachable from any ref, that point at
295 missing objects were mishandled by "git gc" and friends (they
296 should silently be ignored instead)
297
298 * "git describe --contains" penalized light-weight tags so much that
299 they were almost never considered. Instead, give them about the
300 same chance to be considered as an annotated tag that is the same
301 age as the underlying commit would.
302
303 * The "run-command" API implementation has been made more robust
304 against dead-locking in a threaded environment.
305
306 * A recent update to t5545-push-options.sh started skipping all the
307 tests in the script when a web server testing is disabled or
308 unavailable, not just the ones that require a web server. Non HTTP
309 tests have been salvaged to always run in this script.
310
311 * "git send-email" now uses Net::SMTP::SSL, which is obsolete, only
312 when needed. Recent versions of Net::SMTP can do TLS natively.
313
314 * "foo\bar\baz" in "git fetch foo\bar\baz", even though there is no
315 slashes in it, cannot be a nickname for a remote on Windows, as
316 that is likely to be a pathname on a local filesystem.
317
318 * "git clean -d" used to clean directories that has ignored files,
319 even though the command should not lose ignored ones without "-x".
320 "git status --ignored" did not list ignored and untracked files
321 without "-uall". These have been corrected.
322
323 * The result from "git diff" that compares two blobs, e.g. "git diff
324 $commit1:$path $commit2:$path", used to be shown with the full
325 object name as given on the command line, but it is more natural to
326 use the $path in the output and use it to look up .gitattributes.
327
328 * The "collision detecting" SHA-1 implementation shipped with 2.13
329 was quite broken on some big-endian platforms and/or platforms that
330 do not like unaligned fetches. Update to the upstream code which
331 has already fixed these issues.
332
333 * "git am -h" triggered a BUG().
334
335 * The interaction of "url.*.insteadOf" and custom URL scheme's
336 whitelisting is now documented better.
337
338 * The timestamp of the index file is now taken after the file is
339 closed, to help Windows, on which a stale timestamp is reported by
340 fstat() on a file that is opened for writing and data was written
341 but not yet closed.
342
343 * "git pull --rebase --autostash" didn't auto-stash when the local history
344 fast-forwards to the upstream.
345
346 * A flaky test has been corrected.
347
348 * "git $cmd -h" for builtin commands calls the implementation of the
349 command (i.e. cmd_$cmd() function) without doing any repository
350 set-up, and the commands that expect RUN_SETUP is done by the Git
351 potty needs to be prepared to show the help text without barfing.
352 (merge d691551192 jk/consistent-h later to maint).
353
354 * Help contributors that visit us at GitHub.
355
356 * "git stash push <pathspec>" did not work from a subdirectory at all.
357 Bugfix for a topic in v2.13
358
359 * As there is no portable way to pass timezone information to
360 strftime, some output format from "git log" and friends are
361 impossible to produce. Teach our own strbuf_addftime to replace %z
362 and %Z with caller-supplied values to help working around this.
363 (merge 6eced3ec5e rs/strbuf-addftime-zZ later to maint).
364
365 * "git mergetool" learned to work around a wrapper MacOS X adds
366 around underlying meld.
367 (merge 0af85f84bd da/mergetools-meld-output-opt-on-macos later to maint).
368
369 * An example in documentation that does not work in multi worktree
370 configuration has been corrected.
371 (merge 773a88914f ah/doc-gitattributes-empty-index later to maint).
372
373 * The pretty-format specifiers like '%h', '%t', etc. had an
374 optimization that no longer works correctly. In preparation/hope
375 of getting it correctly implemented, first discard the optimization
376 that is broken.
377 (merge fe9e2aefd4 rs/pretty-add-again later to maint).
378
379 * The code to pick up and execute command alias definition from the
380 configuration used to switch to the top of the working tree and
381 then come back when the expanded alias was executed, which was
382 unnecessarilyl complex. Attempt to simplify the logic by using the
383 early-config mechanism that does not chdir around.
384 (merge a9bcf6586d js/alias-early-config later to maint).
385
386 * Fix configuration codepath to pay proper attention to commondir
387 that is used in multi-worktree situation, and isolate config API
388 into its own header file.
389 (merge dc8441fdb4 bw/config-h later to maint).
390
391 * "git add -p" were updated in 2.12 timeframe to cope with custom
392 core.commentchar but the implementation was buggy and a
393 metacharacter like $ and * did not work.
394 (merge d85d7ecb80 jk/add-p-commentchar-fix later to maint).
395
396 * Other minor doc, test and build updates and code cleanups.
397 (merge 68241cb9dd sb/t4005-modernize later to maint).
398 (merge 4fced24712 ks/t7508-indent-fix later to maint).
399 (merge 968b1fe263 mb/reword-autocomplete-message later to maint).