Documentation/RelNotes/2.38.0.txt

   1 Git v2.38 Release Notes
   2 =======================
   3
   4 UI, Workflows & Features
   5
   6  * "git remote show [-n] frotz" now pays attention to negative
   7    pathspec.
   8
   9  * "git push" sometimes performs poorly when reachability bitmaps are
  10    used, even in a repository where other operations are helped by
  11    bitmaps.  The push.useBitmaps configuration variable is introduced
  12    to allow disabling use of reachability bitmaps only for "git push".
  13
  14  * "git grep -m<max-hits>" is a way to limit the hits shown per file.
  15
  16  * "git merge-tree" learned a new mode where it takes two commits and
  17    computes a tree that would result in the merge commit, if the
  18    histories leading to these two commits were to be merged.
  19
  20  * "git mv A B" in a sparsely populated working tree can be asked to
  21    move a path between directories that are "in cone" (i.e. expected
  22    to be materialized in the working tree) and "out of cone"
  23    (i.e. expected to be hidden).  The handling of such cases has been
  24    improved.
  25
  26  * Earlier, HTTP transport clients learned to tell the server side
  27    what locale they are in by sending Accept-Language HTTP header, but
  28    this was done only for some requests but not others.
  29
  30  * Introduce a safe.barerepository configuration variable that
  31    allows users to forbid discovery of bare repositories.
  32
  33  * Various messages that come from the pack-bitmap codepaths have been
  34    tweaked.
  35
  36  * "git rebase -i" learns to update branches whose tip appear in the
  37    rebased range with "--update-refs" option.
  38
  39  * "git ls-files" learns the "--format" option to tweak its output.
  40
  41  * "git cat-file" learned an option to use the mailmap when showing
  42    commit and tag objects.
  43
  44  * When "git merge" finds that it cannot perform a merge, it should
  45    restore the working tree to the state before the command was
  46    initiated, but in some corner cases it didn't.
  47
  48  * Operating modes like "--batch" of "git cat-file" command learned to
  49    take NUL-terminated input, instead of one-item-per-line.
  50
  51  * "git rm" has become more aware of the sparse-index feature.
  52
  53  * "git rev-list --disk-usage" learned to take an optional value
  54    "human" to show the reported value in human-readable format, like
  55    "3.40MiB".
  56
  57  * The "diagnose" feature to create a zip archive for diagnostic
  58    material has been lifted from "scalar" and made into a feature of
  59    "git bugreport".
  60
  61  * The namespaces used by "log --decorate" from "refs/" hierarchy by
  62    default has been tightened.
  63
  64  * "git rev-list --ancestry-path=C A..B" is a natural extension of
  65    "git rev-list A..B"; instead of choosing a subset of A..B to those
  66    that have ancestry relationship with A, it lets a subset with
  67    ancestry relationship with C.
  68
  69  * "scalar" now enables built-in fsmonitor on enlisted repositories,
  70    when able.
  71
  72  * The bash prompt (in contrib/) learned to optionally indicate when
  73    the index is unmerged.
  74
  75  * "git clone" command learned the "--bundle-uri" option to coordinate
  76    with hosting sites the use of pre-prepared bundle files.
  77
  78  * "git range-diff" learned to honor pathspec argument if given.
  79
  80  * "git format-patch --from=<ident>" can be told to add an in-body
  81    "From:" line even for commits that are authored by the given
  82    <ident> with "--force-in-body-from" option.
  83
  84  * The built-in fsmonitor refuses to work on a network mounted
  85    repositories; a configuration knob for users to override this has
  86    been introduced.
  87
  88  * The "scalar" addition from Microsoft is now part of the core Git
  89    installation.
  90
  91
  92 Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.
  93
  94  * Collection of what is referenced by objects in promisor packs have
  95    been optimized to inspect these objects in the in-pack order.
  96
  97  * Introduce a helper to see if a branch is already being worked on
  98    (hence should not be newly checked out in a working tree), which
  99    performs much better than the existing find_shared_symref() to
 100    replace many uses of the latter.
 101
 102  * Teach "git archive" to (optionally and then by default) avoid
 103    spawning an external "gzip" process when creating ".tar.gz" (and
 104    ".tgz") archives.
 105
 106  * Allow large objects read from a packstream to be streamed into a
 107    loose object file straight, without having to keep it in-core as a
 108    whole.
 109
 110  * Further preparation to turn git-submodule.sh into a builtin
 111    continues.
 112
 113  * Apply Coccinelle rule to turn raw memmove() into MOVE_ARRAY() cpp
 114    macro, which would improve maintainability and readability.
 115
 116  * Teach "make all" to build gitweb as well.
 117
 118  * Tweak tests so that they still work when the "git init" template
 119    did not create .git/info directory.
 120
 121  * Add Coccinelle rules to detect the pattern of initializing and then
 122    finalizing a structure without using it in between at all, which
 123    happens after code restructuring and the compilers fail to
 124    recognize as an unused variable.
 125
 126  * The code to convert between GPG trust level strings and internal
 127    constants we use to represent them have been cleaned up.
 128
 129  * Support for libnettle as SHA256 implementation has been added.
 130
 131  * The way "git multi-pack" uses parse-options API has been improved.
 132
 133  * A Coccinelle rule (in contrib/) to encourage use of COPY_ARRAY
 134    macro has been improved.
 135
 136  * API tweak to make it easier to run fuzz testing on commit-graph parser.
 137
 138  * Omit fsync-related trace2 entries when their values are all zero.
 139
 140  * The codepath to write multi-pack index has been taught to release a
 141    large chunk of memory that holds an array of objects in the packs,
 142    as soon as it is done with the array, to reduce memory consumption.
 143
 144  * Add a level of redirection to array allocation API in xdiff part,
 145    to make it easier to share with the libgit2 project.
 146
 147  * "git fetch" client logs the partial clone filter used in the trace2
 148    output.
 149
 150  * The "bundle URI" design gets documented.
 151
 152  * The common ancestor negotiation exchange during a "git fetch"
 153    session now leaves trace log.
 154
 155  * Test portability improvements.
 156    (merge 4d1d843be7 mt/rot13-in-c later to maint).
 157
 158  * The "subcommand" mode is introduced to parse-options API and update
 159    the command line parser of Git commands with subcommands.
 160
 161  * The pack bitmap file gained a bitmap-lookup table to speed up
 162    locating the necessary bitmap for a given commit.
 163
 164  * The assembly version of SHA-1 implementation for PPC has been
 165    removed.
 166
 167  * The server side that responds to "git fetch" and "git clone"
 168    request has been optimized by allowing it to send objects in its
 169    object store without recomputing and validating the object names.
 170
 171  * Annotate function parameters that are not used (but cannot be
 172    removed for structural reasons), to prepare us to later compile
 173    with -Wunused warning turned on.
 174
 175  * Share the text used to explain configuration variables used by "git
 176    <subcmd>" in "git help <subcmd>" with the text from "git help config".
 177
 178  * "git mv A B" in a sparsely populated working tree can be asked to
 179    move a path from a directory that is "in cone" to another directory
 180    that is "out of cone".  Handling of such a case has been improved.
 181
 182  * The chainlint script for our tests has been revamped.
 183
 184
 185 Fixes since v2.37
 186 -----------------
 187
 188  * Rewrite of "git add -i" in C that appeared in Git 2.25 didn't
 189    correctly record a removed file to the index, which was fixed.
 190
 191  * Certain diff options are currently ignored when combined-diff is
 192    shown; mark them as incompatible with the feature.
 193
 194  * Adjust technical/bitmap-format to be formatted by AsciiDoc, and
 195    add some missing information to the documentation.
 196
 197  * Fixes for tests when the source directory has unusual characters in
 198    its path, e.g. whitespaces, double-quotes, etc.
 199
 200  * "git mktree --missing" lazily fetched objects that are missing from
 201    the local object store, which was totally unnecessary for the purpose
 202    of creating the tree object(s) from its input.
 203
 204  * Give _() markings to fatal/warning/usage: labels that are shown in
 205    front of these messages.
 206
 207  * References to commands-to-be-typed-literally in "git rebase"
 208    documentation mark-up have been corrected.
 209
 210  * In a non-bare repository, the behavior of Git when the
 211    core.worktree configuration variable points at a directory that has
 212    a repository as its subdirectory, regressed in Git 2.27 days.
 213
 214  * Recent update to vimdiff layout code has been made more robust
 215    against different end-user vim settings.
 216
 217  * Plug various memory leaks, both in the main code and in test-tool
 218    commands.
 219
 220  * Fixes a long-standing corner case bug around directory renames in
 221    the merge-ort strategy.
 222
 223  * The resolve-undo information in the index was not protected against
 224    GC, which has been corrected.
 225
 226  * A corner case bug where lazily fetching objects from a promisor
 227    remote resulted in infinite recursion has been corrected.
 228
 229  * "git clone" from a repository with some ref whose HEAD is unborn
 230    did not set the HEAD in the resulting repository correctly, which
 231    has been corrected.
 232
 233  * An earlier attempt to plug leaks placed a clean-up label to jump to
 234    at a bogus place, which as been corrected.
 235
 236  * Variable quoting fix in the vimdiff driver of "git mergetool"
 237
 238  * "git shortlog -n" relied on the underlying qsort() to be stable,
 239    which shouldn't have.  Fixed.
 240
 241  * A fix for a regression in test framework.
 242
 243  * mkstemp() emulation on Windows has been improved.
 244
 245  * Add missing documentation for "include" and "includeIf" features in
 246    "git config" file format, which incidentally teaches the command
 247    line completion to include them in its offerings.
 248
 249  * Avoid "white/black-list" in documentation and code comments.
 250
 251  * Workaround for a compiler warning against use of die() in
 252    osx-keychain (in contrib/).
 253
 254  * Workaround for a false positive compiler warning.
 255
 256  * "git p4" working on UTF-16 files on Windows did not implement
 257    CRLF-to-LF conversion correctly, which has been corrected.
 258
 259  * "git p4" did not handle non-ASCII client name well, which has been
 260    corrected.
 261
 262  * "rerere-train" script (in contrib/) used to honor commit.gpgSign
 263    while recreating the throw-away merges.
 264
 265  * "git checkout" miscounted the paths it updated, which has been
 266    corrected.
 267
 268  * Fix for a bug that makes write-tree to fail to write out a
 269    non-existent index as a tree, introduced in 2.37.
 270
 271  * There was a bug in the codepath to upgrade generation information
 272    in commit-graph from v1 to v2 format, which has been corrected.
 273
 274  * Gitweb had legacy URL shortener that is specific to the way
 275    projects hosted on kernel.org used to (but no longer) work, which
 276    has been removed.
 277
 278  * Fix build procedure for Windows that uses CMake so that it can pick
 279    up the shell interpreter from local installation location.
 280
 281  * Conditionally allow building Python interpreter on Windows
 282
 283  * Fix to lstat() emulation on Windows.
 284
 285  * Older gcc with -Wall complains about the universal zero initializer
 286    "struct s = { 0 };" idiom, which makes developers' lives
 287    inconvenient (as -Werror is enabled by DEVELOPER=YesPlease).  The
 288    build procedure has been tweaked to help these compilers.
 289
 290  * Plug memory leaks in the failure code path in the "merge-ort" merge
 291    strategy backend.
 292
 293  * "git symbolic-ref symref non..sen..se" is now diagnosed as an error.
 294
 295  * A follow-up fix to a fix for a regression in 2.36 around hooks.
 296
 297  * Avoid repeatedly running getconf to ask libc version in the test
 298    suite, and instead just as it once per script.
 299
 300  * Platform-specific code that determines if a directory is OK to use
 301    as a repository has been taught to report more details, especially
 302    on Windows.
 303
 304  * "vimdiff3" regression fix.
 305
 306  * "git fsck" reads mode from tree objects but canonicalizes the mode
 307    before passing it to the logic to check object sanity, which has
 308    hid broken tree objects from the checking logic.  This has been
 309    corrected, but to help existing projects with broken tree objects
 310    that they cannot fix retroactively, the severity of anomalies this
 311    code detects has been demoted to "info" for now.
 312
 313  * Fixes to sparse index compatibility work for "reset" and "checkout"
 314    commands.
 315
 316  * An earlier optimization discarded a tree-object buffer that is
 317    still in use, which has been corrected.
 318
 319  * Fix deadlocks between main Git process and subprocess spawned via
 320    the pipe_command() API, that can kill "git add -p" that was
 321    reimplemented in C recently.
 322
 323  * The sequencer machinery translated messages left in the reflog by
 324    mistake, which has been corrected.
 325
 326  * xcalloc(), imitating calloc(), takes "number of elements of the
 327    array", and "size of a single element", in this order.  A call that
 328    does not follow this ordering has been corrected.
 329
 330  * The preload-index codepath made copies of pathspec to give to
 331    multiple threads, which were left leaked.
 332
 333  * Update the version of Ubuntu used for GitHub Actions CI from 18.04
 334    to 22.04.
 335
 336  * The auto-stashed local changes created by "git merge --autostash"
 337    was mixed into a conflicted state left in the working tree, which
 338    has been corrected.
 339
 340  * Multi-pack index got corrupted when preferred pack changed from one
 341    pack to another in a certain way, which has been corrected.
 342    (merge 99e4d084ff tb/midx-with-changing-preferred-pack-fix later to maint).
 343
 344  * The clean-up of temporary files created via mks_tempfile_dt() was
 345    racy and attempted to unlink() the leading directory when signals
 346    are involved, which has been corrected.
 347    (merge babe2e0559 rs/tempfile-cleanup-race-fix later to maint).
 348
 349  * FreeBSD portability fix for "git maintenance" that spawns "crontab"
 350    to schedule tasks.
 351    (merge ee69e7884e bc/gc-crontab-fix later to maint).
 352
 353  * Those who use diff-so-fancy as the diff-filter noticed a regression
 354    or two in the code that parses the diff output in the built-in
 355    version of "add -p", which has been corrected.
 356    (merge 0a101676e5 js/add-p-diff-parsing-fix later to maint).
 357
 358  * Segfault fix-up to an earlier fix to the topic to teach "git reset"
 359    and "git checkout" work better in a sparse checkout.
 360    (merge 037f8ea6d9 vd/sparse-reset-checkout-fixes later to maint).
 361
 362  * "git diff --no-index A B" managed its the pathnames of its two
 363    input files rather haphazardly, sometimes leaking them.  The
 364    command line argument processing has been straightened out to clean
 365    it up.
 366    (merge 2b43dd0eb5 rs/diff-no-index-cleanup later to maint).
 367
 368  * "git rev-list --verify-objects" ought to inspect the contents of
 369    objects and notice corrupted ones, but it didn't when the commit
 370    graph is in use, which has been corrected.
 371    (merge b27ccae34b jk/rev-list-verify-objects-fix later to maint).
 372
 373  * More fixes to "add -p"
 374    (merge 64ec8efb83 js/builtin-add-p-portability-fix later to maint).
 375
 376  * The parser in the script interface to parse-options in "git
 377    rev-parse" has been updated to diagnose a bogus input correctly.
 378    (merge f20b9c36d0 ow/rev-parse-parseopt-fix later to maint).
 379
 380  * The code that manages list-object-filter structure, used in partial
 381    clones, leaked the instances, which has been plugged.
 382    (merge 66eede4a37 jk/plug-list-object-filter-leaks later to maint).
 383
 384  * Fix another UI regression in the reimplemented "add -p".
 385    (merge f6f0ee247f rs/add-p-worktree-mode-prompt-fix later to maint).
 386
 387  * "git fetch" over protocol v2 sent an incorrect ref prefix request
 388    to the server and made "git pull" with configured fetch refspec
 389    that does not cover the remote branch to merge with fail, which has
 390    been corrected.
 391    (merge 49ca2fba39 jk/proto-v2-ref-prefix-fix later to maint).
 392
 393  * A result from opendir() was leaking in the commit-graph expiration
 394    codepath, which has been plugged.
 395    (merge 12f1ae5324 ml/commit-graph-expire-dir-leak-fix later to maint).
 396
 397  * Just like we have coding guidelines, we now have guidelines for
 398    reviewers.
 399    (merge e01b851923 vd/doc-reviewing-guidelines later to maint).
 400
 401  * Other code cleanup, docfix, build fix, etc.
 402    (merge 77b9e85c0f vd/fix-perf-tests later to maint).
 403    (merge 0682bc43f5 jk/test-crontab-fixes later to maint).
 404    (merge b46dd1726c cc/doc-trailer-whitespace-rules later to maint).