Documentation/RelNotes/2.44.0.txt

   1 Git v2.44 Release Notes
   2 =======================
   3
   4 Backward Compatibility Notes
   5
   6  * "git chekcout -B <branch>" used to allow switching to a branch that
   7    is in use on another worktree, but this was by mistake.  The users
   8    need to use "--ignore-other-worktrees" option.
   9
  10
  11 UI, Workflows & Features
  12
  13  * "git add" and "git stash" learned to support the ":(attr:...)"
  14    magic pathspec.
  15
  16  * "git rebase --autosquash" is now enabled for non-interactive rebase,
  17    but it is still incompatible with the apply backend.
  18
  19  * Introduce "git replay", a tool meant on the server side without
  20    working tree to recreate a history.
  21
  22  * "git merge-file" learned to take the "--diff-algorithm" option to
  23    use algorithm different from the default "myers" diff.
  24
  25  * Command line completion (in contrib/) learned to complete path
  26    arguments to the "add/set" subcommands of "git sparse-checkout"
  27    better.
  28
  29  * "git checkout -B <branch> [<start-point>]" allowed a branch that is
  30    in use in another worktree to be updated and checked out, which
  31    might be a bit unexpected.  The rule has been tightened, which is a
  32    breaking change.  "--ignore-other-worktrees" option is required to
  33    unbreak you, if you are used to the current behaviour that "-B"
  34    overrides the safety.
  35
  36  * The builtin_objectmode attribute is populated for each path
  37    without adding anything in .gitattributes files, which would be
  38    useful in magic pathspec, e.g., ":(attr:builtin_objectmode=100755)"
  39    to limit to executables.
  40
  41  * "git fetch" learned to pay attention to "fetch.all" configuration
  42    variable, which pretends as if "--all" was passed from the command
  43    line when no remote parameter was given.
  44
  45  * In addition to (rather cryptic) Security Identifiers, show username
  46    and domain in the error message when we barf on mismatch between
  47    the Git directory and the current user on Windows.
  48
  49  * The error message given when "git branch -d branch" fails due to
  50    commits unique to the branch has been split into an error and a new
  51    conditional advice message.
  52
  53  * When given an existing but unreadable file as a configuration file,
  54    gitweb behaved as if the file did not exist at all, but now it
  55    errors out.  This is a change that may break backward compatibility.
  56
  57  * When $HOME/.gitignore is missing but XDG config file available, we
  58    should write into the latter, not former.  "git gc" and "git
  59    maintenance" wrote into a wrong "global config" file, which have
  60    been corrected.
  61
  62  * Define "special ref" as a very narrow set that consists of
  63    FETCH_HEAD and MERGE_HEAD, and clarify everything else that used to
  64    be classified as such are actually just pseudorefs.
  65
  66  * All conditional "advice" messages show how to turn them off, which
  67    becomes repetitive.  Setting advice.* configuration explicitly on
  68    now omits the instruction part.
  69
  70  * The "disable repository discovery of a bare repository" check,
  71    triggered by setting safe.bareRepository configuration variable to
  72    'explicit', has been loosened to exclude the ".git/" directory inside
  73    a non-bare repository from the check.  So you can do "cd .git &&
  74    git cmd" to run a Git command that works on a bare repository without
  75    explicitly specifying $GIT_DIR now.
  76
  77  * The completion script (in contrib/) learned more options that can
  78    be used with "git log".
  79
  80  * The labels on conflict markers for the common ancestor, our version,
  81    and the other version are available to custom 3-way merge driver
  82    via %S, %X, and %Y placeholders.
  83
  84  * The write codepath for the reftable data learned to honor
  85    core.fsync configuration.
  86
  87  * The "--fsck-objects" option of "git index-pack" now can take the
  88    optional parameter to tweak severity of different fsck errors.
  89
  90  * The wincred credential backend has been taught to support oauth
  91    refresh token the same way as credential-cache and
  92    credential-libsecret backends.
  93
  94
  95 Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.
  96
  97  * Process to add some form of low-level unit tests has started.
  98
  99  * Add support for GitLab CI.
 100
 101  * "git for-each-ref --no-sort" still sorted the refs alphabetically
 102    which paid non-trivial cost.  It has been redefined to show output
 103    in an unspecified order, to allow certain optimizations to take
 104    advantage of.
 105
 106  * Simplify API implementation to delete references by eliminating
 107    duplication.
 108
 109  * Subject approxidate() and show_date() machinery to OSS-Fuzz.
 110
 111  * A new helper to let us pretend that we called lstat() when we know
 112    our cache_entry is up-to-date via fsmonitor.
 113
 114  * The optimization based on fsmonitor in the "diff --cached"
 115    codepath is resurrected with the "fake-lstat" introduced earlier.
 116
 117  * Test balloon to use C99 "bool" type from <stdbool.h> has been
 118    added.
 119
 120  * "git clone" has been prepared to allow cloning a repository with
 121    non-default hash function into a repository that uses the reftable
 122    backend.
 123
 124  * Streaming spans of packfile data used to be done only from a
 125    single, primary, pack in a repository with multiple packfiles.  It
 126    has been extended to allow reuse from other packfiles, too.
 127
 128  * Comment updates to help developers not to attempt to modify
 129    messages from plumbing commands that must stay constant.
 130
 131    It might make sense to reassess the plumbing needs every few years,
 132    but that should be done as a separate effort.
 133
 134  * Move test-ctype helper to the unit-test framework.
 135
 136  * Instead of manually creating refs/ hierarchy on disk upon a
 137    creation of a secondary worktree, which is only usable via the
 138    files backend, use the refs API to populate it.
 139
 140  * CI for GitLab learned to drive macOS jobs.
 141
 142  * A few tests to "git commit -o <pathspec>" and "git commit -i
 143    <pathspec>" has been added.
 144
 145  * Tests on ref API are moved around to prepare for reftable.
 146
 147  * The Makefile often had to say "-L$(path) -R$(path)" that repeats
 148    the path to the same library directory for link time and runtime.
 149    A Makefile template is used to reduce such repetition.
 150
 151  * The priority queue test has been migrated to the unit testing
 152    framework.
 153
 154
 155 Fixes since v2.43
 156 -----------------
 157
 158  * The way CI testing used "prove" could lead to running the test
 159    suite twice needlessly, which has been corrected.
 160
 161  * Update ref-related tests.
 162
 163  * "git format-patch --encode-email-headers" ignored the option when
 164    preparing the cover letter, which has been corrected.
 165
 166  * Newer versions of Getopt::Long started giving warnings against our
 167    (ab)use of it in "git send-email".  Bump the minimum version
 168    requirement for Perl to 5.8.1 (from September 2002) to allow
 169    simplifying our implementation.
 170
 171  * Earlier we stopped relying on commit-graph that (still) records
 172    information about commits that are lost from the object store,
 173    which has negative performance implications.  The default has been
 174    flipped to disable this pessimization.
 175
 176  * Stale URLs have been updated to their current counterparts (or
 177    archive.org) and HTTP links are replaced with working HTTPS links.
 178
 179  * trace2 streams used to record the URLs that potentially embed
 180    authentication material, which has been corrected.
 181
 182  * The sample pre-commit hook that tries to catch introduction of new
 183    paths that use potentially non-portable characters did not notice
 184    an existing path getting renamed to such a problematic path, when
 185    rename detection was enabled.
 186
 187  * The command line parser for the "log" family of commands was too
 188    loose when parsing certain numbers, e.g., silently ignoring the
 189    extra 'q' in "git log -n 1q" without complaining, which has been
 190    tightened up.
 191
 192  * "git $cmd --end-of-options --rev -- --path" for some $cmd failed
 193    to interpret "--rev" as a rev, and "--path" as a path.  This was
 194    fixed for many programs like "reset" and "checkout".
 195
 196  * "git bisect reset" has been taught to clean up state files and refs
 197    even when BISECT_START file is gone.
 198
 199  * Some codepaths did not correctly parse configuration variables
 200    specified with valueless "true", which has been corrected.
 201
 202  * Code clean-up for sanity checking of command line options for "git
 203    show-ref".
 204
 205  * The code to parse the From e-mail header has been updated to avoid
 206    recursion.
 207
 208  * "git fetch --atomic" issued an unnecessary empty error message,
 209    which has been corrected.
 210
 211  * Command line completion script (in contrib/) learned to work better
 212    with the reftable backend.
 213
 214  * "git status" is taught to show both the branch being bisected and
 215    being rebased when both are in effect at the same time.
 216
 217  * "git archive --list extra garbage" silently ignored excess command
 218    line parameters, which has been corrected.
 219
 220  * "git sparse-checkout set" added default patterns even when the
 221    patterns are being fed from the standard input, which has been
 222    corrected.
 223
 224  * "git sparse-checkout (add|set) --[no-]cone --end-of-options" did
 225    not handle "--end-of-options" correctly after a recent update.
 226
 227  * Unlike other environment variables that took the usual
 228    true/false/yes/no as well as 0/1, GIT_FLUSH only understood 0/1,
 229    which has been corrected.
 230
 231  * Clearing in-core repository (happens during e.g., "git fetch
 232    --recurse-submodules" with commit graph enabled) made in-core
 233    commit object in an inconsistent state by discarding the necessary
 234    data from commit-graph too early, which has been corrected.
 235
 236  * Update to a new feature recently added, "git show-ref --exists".
 237    (merge 0aabeaa562 tc/show-ref-exists-fix later to maint).
 238
 239  * oss-fuzz tests are built and run in CI.
 240    (merge c4a9cf1df3 js/oss-fuzz-build-in-ci later to maint).
 241
 242  * Rename detection logic ignored the final line of a file if it is an
 243    incomplete line.
 244    (merge 1c5bc6971e en/diffcore-delta-final-line-fix later to maint).
 245
 246  * GitHub CI update.
 247    (merge 0188b2c8e0 pb/ci-github-skip-logs-for-broken-tests later to maint).
 248
 249  * "git diff --no-rename A B" did not disable rename detection but did
 250    not trigger an error from the command line parser.
 251    (merge 457f96252f rs/parse-options-with-keep-unknown-abbrev-fix later to maint).
 252
 253  * "git archive --remote=<remote>" learned to talk over the smart
 254    http (aka stateless) transport.
 255    (merge 176cd68634 jx/remote-archive-over-smart-http later to maint).
 256
 257  * Fetching via protocol v0 over Smart HTTP transport sometimes failed
 258    to correctly auto-follow tags.
 259    (merge fba732c462 jk/fetch-auto-tag-following-fix later to maint).
 260
 261  * The documentation for the --exclude-per-directory option marked it
 262    as deprecated, which confused readers into thinking there may be a
 263    plan to remove it in the future, which was not our intention.
 264    (merge 0009542cab jc/ls-files-doc-update later to maint).
 265
 266  * "git diff --no-index file1 file2" segfaulted while invoking the
 267    external diff driver, which has been corrected.
 268    (merge 85a9a63c92 jk/diff-external-with-no-index later to maint).
 269
 270  * Rewrite //-comments to /* comments */ in files whose comments
 271    prevalently use the latter.
 272    (merge de65079d7b jc/comment-style-fixes later to maint).
 273
 274  * Cirrus CI jobs started breaking because we specified version of
 275    FreeBSD that is no longer available, which has been corrected.
 276    (merge 81fffb66d3 cb/use-freebsd-13-2-at-cirrus-ci later to maint).
 277
 278  * A caller called index_file_exists() that takes a string expressed
 279    as <ptr, length> with a wrong length, which has been corrected.
 280    (merge 156e28b36d jh/sparse-index-expand-to-path-fix later to maint).
 281
 282  * Other code cleanup, docfix, build fix, etc.
 283    (merge 5aea3955bc rj/clarify-branch-doc-m later to maint).
 284    (merge 9cce3be2df bk/bisect-doc-fix later to maint).
 285    (merge 8f50984cf4 ne/doc-filter-blob-limit-fix later to maint).
 286    (merge f10b0989b8 la/strvec-comment-fix later to maint).
 287    (merge 8430b438f6 vd/fsck-submodule-url-test later to maint).
 288    (merge f10031fadd nb/rebase-x-shell-docfix later to maint).
 289    (merge af3d2c160f jc/majordomo-to-subspace later to maint).
 290    (merge ee9895b0ff sd/negotiate-trace-fix later to maint).
 291    (merge 976d0251ce jc/coc-whitespace-fix later to maint).
 292    (merge 9023198280 jt/p4-spell-re-with-raw-string later to maint).
 293    (merge 36c9c44fa4 tb/pack-bitmap-drop-unused-struct-member later to maint).
 294    (merge 19ed0dff8f js/win32-retry-pipe-write-on-enospc later to maint).
 295    (merge 3cb4384683 jc/t0091-with-unknown-git later to maint).