Documentation/RelNotes/2.18.0.txt

   1 Git 2.18 Release Notes
   2 ======================
   3
   4 Updates since v2.17
   5 -------------------
   6
   7 UI, Workflows & Features
   8
   9  * Rename detection logic in "diff" family that is used in "merge" has
  10    learned to guess when all of x/a, x/b and x/c have moved to z/a,
  11    z/b and z/c, it is likely that x/d added in the meantime would also
  12    want to move to z/d by taking the hint that the entire directory
  13    'x' moved to 'z'.  A bug causing dirty files involved in a rename
  14    to be overwritten during merge has also been fixed as part of this
  15    work.
  16
  17  * "git filter-branch" learned to use a different exit code to allow
  18    the callers to tell the case where there was no new commits to
  19    rewrite from other error cases.
  20
  21  * When built with more recent cURL, GIT_SSL_VERSION can now specify
  22    "tlsv1.3" as its value.
  23
  24  * "git gui" learned that "~/.ssh/id_ecdsa.pub" and
  25    "~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub" are also possible SSH key files.
  26    (merge 2e2f0288ef bb/git-gui-ssh-key-files later to maint).
  27
  28  * "git gui" performs commit upon CTRL/CMD+ENTER but the
  29    CTRL/CMD+KP_ENTER (i.e. enter key on the numpad) did not have the
  30    same key binding.  It now does.
  31    (merge 28a1d94a06 bp/git-gui-bind-kp-enter later to maint).
  32
  33  * "git gui" has been taught to work with old versions of tk (like
  34    8.5.7) that do not support "ttk::style theme use" as a way to query
  35    the current theme.
  36    (merge 4891961105 cb/git-gui-ttk-style later to maint).
  37
  38  * "git rebase" has learned to honor "--signoff" option when using
  39    backends other than "am" (but not "--preserve-merges").
  40
  41  * "git branch --list" during an interrupted "rebase -i" now lets
  42    users distinguish the case where a detached HEAD is being rebased
  43    and a normal branch is being rebased.
  44
  45  * "git mergetools" learned talking to guiffy.
  46
  47  * The scripts in contrib/emacs/ have outlived their usefulness and
  48    have been replaced with a stub that errors out and tells the user
  49    there are replacements.
  50
  51  * The new "checkout-encoding" attribute can ask Git to convert the
  52    contents to the specified encoding when checking out to the working
  53    tree (and the other way around when checking in).
  54
  55  * The "git config" command uses separate options e.g. "--int",
  56    "--bool", etc. to specify what type the caller wants the value to
  57    be interpreted as.  A new "--type=<typename>" option has been
  58    introduced, which would make it cleaner to define new types.
  59
  60  * "git config --get" learned the "--default" option, to help the
  61    calling script.  Building on top of the above changes, the
  62    "git config" learns "--type=color" type.  Taken together, you can
  63    do things like "git config --get foo.color --default blue" and get
  64    the ANSI color sequence for the color given to foo.color variable,
  65    or "blue" if the variable does not exist.
  66
  67  * "git ls-remote" learned an option to allow sorting its output based
  68    on the refnames being shown.
  69
  70  * The command line completion (in contrib/) has been taught that "git
  71    stash save" has been deprecated ("git stash push" is the preferred
  72    spelling in the new world) and does not offer it as a possible
  73    completion candidate when "git stash push" can be.
  74
  75  * "git gc --prune=nonsense" spent long time repacking and then
  76    silently failed when underlying "git prune --expire=nonsense"
  77    failed to parse its command line.  This has been corrected.
  78
  79  * Error messages from "git push" can be painted for more visibility.
  80
  81  * "git http-fetch" (deprecated) had an optional and experimental
  82    "feature" to fetch only commits and/or trees, which nobody used.
  83    This has been removed.
  84
  85
  86 Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.
  87
  88  * A "git fetch" from a repository with insane number of refs into a
  89    repository that is already up-to-date still wasted too many cycles
  90    making many lstat(2) calls to see if these objects at the tips
  91    exist as loose objects locally.  These lstat(2) calls are optimized
  92    away by enumerating all loose objects beforehand.
  93    It is unknown if the new strategy negatively affects existing use
  94    cases, fetching into a repository with many loose objects from a
  95    repository with small number of refs.
  96
  97  * Git can be built to use either v1 or v2 of the PCRE library, and so
  98    far, the build-time configuration USE_LIBPCRE=YesPlease instructed
  99    the build procedure to use v1, but now it means v2.  USE_LIBPCRE1
 100    and USE_LIBPCRE2 can be used to explicitly choose which version to
 101    use, as before.
 102
 103  * The build procedure learned to optionally use symbolic links
 104    (instead of hardlinks and copies) to install "git-foo" for built-in
 105    commands, whose binaries are all identical.
 106
 107  * Conversion from uchar[20] to struct object_id continues.
 108
 109  * The way "git worktree prune" worked internally has been simplified,
 110    by assuming how "git worktree move" moves an existing worktree to a
 111    different place.
 112
 113  * Code clean-up for the "repository" abstraction.
 114    (merge 00a3da2a13 nd/remove-ignore-env-field later to maint).
 115
 116  * Code to find the length to uniquely abbreviate object names based
 117    on packfile content, which is a relatively recent addtion, has been
 118    optimized to use the same fan-out table.
 119
 120  * The mechanism to use parse-options API to automate the command line
 121    completion continues to get extended and polished.
 122
 123  * Copies of old scripted Porcelain commands in contrib/examples/ have
 124    been removed.
 125
 126  * Some tests that rely on the exact hardcoded values of object names
 127    have been updated in preparation for hash function migration.
 128
 129  * Perf-test update.
 130
 131  * Test helper update.
 132
 133  * The effort continues to refactor the internal global data structure
 134    to make it possible to open multiple repositories, work with and
 135    then close them,
 136
 137  * Small test-helper programs have been consolidated into a single
 138    binary.
 139
 140  * API clean-up around ref-filter code.
 141
 142  * Shell completion (in contrib) that gives list of paths have been
 143    optimized somewhat.
 144
 145  * The index file is updated to record the fsmonitor section after a
 146    full scan was made, to avoid wasting the effort that has already
 147    spent.
 148
 149  * Performance measuring framework in t/perf learned to help bisecting
 150    performance regressions.
 151
 152  * Some multi-word source filenames are being renamed to separate
 153    words with dashes instead of underscores.
 154
 155  * An reusable "memory pool" implementation has been extracted from
 156    fast-import.c, which in turn has become the first user of the
 157    mem-pool API.
 158
 159  * A build-time option has been added to allow Git to be told to refer
 160    to its associated files relative to the main binary, in the same
 161    way that has been possible on Windows for quite some time, for
 162    Linux, BSDs and Darwin.
 163
 164  * Precompute and store information necessary for ancestry traversal
 165    in a separate file to optimize graph walking.
 166
 167  * The effort to pass the repository in-core structure throughout the
 168    API continues.  This round deals with the code that implements the
 169    refs/replace/ mechanism.
 170
 171  * The build procedure "make DEVELOPER=YesPlease" learned to enable a
 172    bit more warning options depending on the compiler used to help
 173    developers more.  There also is "make DEVOPTS=tokens" knob
 174    available now, for those who want to help fixing warnings we
 175    usually ignore, for example.
 176
 177  * A new version of the transport protocol is being worked on.
 178
 179  * The code to interface to GPG has been restructured somewhat to make
 180    it cleaner to integrate with other types of signature systems later.
 181
 182
 183 Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
 184
 185
 186 Fixes since v2.17
 187 -----------------
 188
 189  * "git shortlog cruft" aborted with a BUG message when run outside a
 190    Git repository.  The command has been taught to complain about
 191    extra and unwanted arguments on its command line instead in such a
 192    case.
 193    (merge 4aa0161e83 ma/shortlog-revparse later to maint).
 194
 195  * "git stash push -u -- <pathspec>" gave an unnecessary and confusing
 196    error message when there was no tracked files that match the
 197    <pathspec>, which has been fixed.
 198    (merge 353278687e tg/stash-untracked-with-pathspec-fix later to maint).
 199
 200  * "git tag --contains no-such-commit" gave a full list of options
 201    after giving an error message.
 202    (merge 3bb0923f06 ps/contains-id-error-message later to maint).
 203
 204  * "diff-highlight" filter (in contrib/) learned to undertand "git log
 205    --graph" output better.
 206    (merge 4551fbba14 jk/diff-highlight-graph-fix later to maint).
 207
 208  * when refs that do not point at committish are given, "git
 209    filter-branch" gave a misleading error messages.  This has been
 210    corrected.
 211    (merge f78ab355e7 yk/filter-branch-non-committish-refs later to maint).
 212
 213  * "git submodule status" misbehaved on a submodule that has been
 214    removed from the working tree.
 215    (merge 74b6bda32f rs/status-with-removed-submodule later to maint).
 216
 217  * When credential helper exits very quickly without reading its
 218    input, it used to cause Git to die with SIGPIPE, which has been
 219    fixed.
 220    (merge a0d51e8d0e eb/cred-helper-ignore-sigpipe later to maint).
 221
 222  * "git rebase --keep-empty" still removed an empty commit if the
 223    other side contained an empty commit (due to the "does an
 224    equivalent patch exist already?" check), which has been corrected.
 225    (merge 3d946165e1 pw/rebase-keep-empty-fixes later to maint).
 226
 227  * Some codepaths, including the refs API, get and keep relative
 228    paths, that go out of sync when the process does chdir(2).  The
 229    chdir-notify API is introduced to let these codepaths adjust these
 230    cached paths to the new current directory.
 231    (merge fb9c2d2703 jk/relative-directory-fix later to maint).
 232
 233  * "cd sub/dir && git commit ../path" ought to record the changes to
 234    the file "sub/path", but this regressed long time ago.
 235    (merge 86238e07ef bw/commit-partial-from-subdirectory-fix later to maint).
 236
 237  * Recent introduction of "--log-destination" option to "git daemon"
 238    did not work well when the daemon was run under "--inetd" mode.
 239    (merge e67d906d73 lw/daemon-log-destination later to maint).
 240
 241  * Small fix to the autoconf build procedure.
 242    (merge 249482daf0 es/fread-reads-dir-autoconf-fix later to maint).
 243
 244  * Fix an unexploitable (because the oversized contents are not under
 245    attacker's control) buffer overflow.
 246    (merge d8579accfa bp/fsmonitor-bufsize-fix later to maint).
 247
 248  * Recent simplification of build procedure forgot a bit of tweak to
 249    the build procedure of contrib/mw-to-git/
 250    (merge d8698987f3 ab/simplify-perl-makefile later to maint).
 251
 252  * Moving a submodule that itself has submodule in it with "git mv"
 253    forgot to make necessary adjustment to the nested sub-submodules;
 254    now the codepath learned to recurse into the submodules.
 255
 256  * "git config --unset a.b", when "a.b" is the last variable in an
 257    otherwise empty section "a", left an empty section "a" behind, and
 258    worse yet, a subsequent "git config a.c value" did not reuse that
 259    empty shell and instead created a new one.  These have been
 260    (partially) corrected.
 261    (merge c71d8bb38a js/empty-config-section-fix later to maint).
 262
 263  * "git worktree remove" learned that "-f" is a shorthand for
 264    "--force" option, just like for "git worktree add".
 265    (merge d228eea514 sb/worktree-remove-opt-force later to maint).
 266
 267  * The completion script (in contrib/) learned to clear cached list of
 268    command line options upon dot-sourcing it again in a more efficient
 269    way.
 270    (merge 94408dc71c sg/completion-clear-cached later to maint).
 271
 272  * "git svn" had a minor thinko/typo which has been fixed.
 273    (merge 51db271587 ab/git-svn-get-record-typofix later to maint).
 274
 275  * During a "rebase -i" session, the code could give older timestamp
 276    to commits created by later "pick" than an earlier "reword", which
 277    has been corrected.
 278    (merge 12f7babd6b js/ident-date-fix later to maint).
 279
 280  * "git submodule status" did not check the symbolic revision name it
 281    computed for the submodule HEAD is not the NULL, and threw it at
 282    printf routines, which has been corrected.
 283    (merge 0b5e2ea7cf nd/submodule-status-fix later to maint).
 284
 285  * When fed input that already has In-Reply-To: and/or References:
 286    headers and told to add the same information, "git send-email"
 287    added these headers separately, instead of appending to an existing
 288    one, which is a violation of the RFC.  This has been corrected.
 289    (merge 256be1d3f0 sa/send-email-dedup-some-headers later to maint).
 290
 291  * "git fast-export" had a regression in v2.15.0 era where it skipped
 292    some merge commits in certain cases, which has been corrected.
 293    (merge be011bbe00 ma/fast-export-skip-merge-fix later to maint).
 294
 295  * Other minor doc, test and build updates and code cleanups.
 296    (merge 248f66ed8e nd/trace-with-env later to maint).
 297    (merge 14ced5562c ys/bisect-object-id-missing-conversion-fix later to maint).
 298    (merge 5988eb631a ab/doc-hash-brokenness later to maint).
 299    (merge a4d4e32a70 pk/test-avoid-pipe-hiding-exit-status later to maint).
 300    (merge 05e293c1ac jk/flockfile-stdio later to maint).
 301    (merge e9184b0789 jk/t5561-missing-curl later to maint).
 302    (merge b1801b85a3 nd/worktree-move later to maint).
 303    (merge bbd374dd20 ak/bisect-doc-typofix later to maint).
 304    (merge 4855f06fb3 mn/send-email-credential-doc later to maint).
 305    (merge 8523b1e355 en/doc-typoes later to maint).
 306    (merge 43b44ccfe7 js/t5404-path-fix later to maint).
 307    (merge decf711fc1 ps/test-chmtime-get later to maint).
 308    (merge 22d11a6e8e es/worktree-docs later to maint).
 309    (merge 92a5dbbc22 tg/use-git-contacts later to maint).
 310    (merge adc887221f tq/t1510 later to maint).
 311    (merge bed21a8ad6 sg/doc-gc-quote-mismatch-fix later to maint).
 312    (merge 73364e4f10 tz/doc-git-urls-reference later to maint).