Documentation/RelNotes/2.6.0.txt

   1 Git 2.6 Release Notes
   2 =====================
   3
   4 Updates since v2.5
   5 ------------------
   6
   7 UI, Workflows & Features
   8
   9  * An asterisk as a substring (as opposed to the entirety) of a path
  10    component for both side of a refspec, e.g.
  11    "refs/heads/o*:refs/remotes/heads/i*", is now allowed.
  12
  13  * New userdiff pattern definition for fountain screenwriting markup
  14    format has been added.
  15
  16  * "git log" and friends learned a new "--date=format:..." option to
  17    format timestamps using system's strftime(3).
  18
  19  * "git fast-import" learned to respond to the get-mark command via
  20    its cat-blob-fd interface.
  21
  22  * "git rebase -i" learned "drop commit-object-name subject" command
  23    as another way to skip replaying of a commit.
  24
  25  * A new configuration variable can enable "--follow" automatically
  26    when "git log" is run with one pathspec argument.
  27
  28  * "git status" learned to show a more detailed information regarding
  29    the "rebase -i" session in progress.
  30
  31  * "git cat-file" learned "--batch-all-objects" option to enumerate all
  32    available objects in the repository more quickly than "rev-list
  33    --all --objects" (the output includes unreachable objects, though).
  34
  35  * "git fsck" learned to ignore errors on a set of known-to-be-bad
  36    objects, and also allows the warning levels of various kinds of
  37    non-critical breakages to be tweaked.
  38
  39  * "git rebase -i"'s list of todo is made configurable.
  40
  41  * "git send-email" now performs alias-expansion on names that are
  42    given via --cccmd, etc.
  43
  44  * An environment variable GIT_REPLACE_REF_BASE tells Git to look into
  45    refs hierarchy other than refs/replace/ for the object replacement
  46    data.
  47
  48  * Allow untracked cache (experimental) to be used when sparse
  49    checkout (experimental) is also in use.
  50
  51  * "git pull --rebase" has been taught to pay attention to
  52    rebase.autostash configuration.
  53
  54  * The command-line completion script (in contrib/) has been updated.
  55
  56  * A negative !ref entry in multi-value transfer.hideRefs
  57    configuration can be used to say "don't hide this one".
  58
  59
  60 Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.
  61
  62  * In preparation for allowing different "backends" to store the refs
  63    in a way different from the traditional "one ref per file in
  64    $GIT_DIR or in a $GIT_DIR/packed-refs file" filesystem storage,
  65    direct filesystem access to ref-like things like CHERRY_PICK_HEAD
  66    from scripts and programs has been reduced.
  67
  68  * Computation of untracked status indicator by bash prompt
  69    script (in contrib/) has been optimized.
  70
  71  * Memory use reduction when commit-slab facility is used to annotate
  72    sparsely (which is not recommended in the first place).
  73
  74  * Clean up refs API and make "git clone" less intimate with the
  75    implementation detail.
  76
  77  * "git pull" was reimplemented in C.
  78
  79  * The packet tracing machinery allows to capture an incoming pack
  80    data to a file for debugging.
  81
  82  * Move machinery to parse human-readable scaled numbers like 1k, 4M,
  83    and 2G as an option parameter's value from pack-objects to
  84    parse-options API, to make it available to other codepaths.
  85
  86  * "git verify-tag" and "git verify-commit" have been taught to share
  87    more code, and then learned to optionally show the verification
  88    message from the underlying GPG implementation.
  89
  90  * Various enhancements around "git am" reading patches generated by
  91    foreign SCM have been made.
  92
  93  * Ref listing by "git branch -l" and "git tag -l" commands has
  94    started to be rebuilt, based on the for-each-ref machinery.
  95
  96  * The code to perform multi-tree merges has been taught to repopulate
  97    the cache-tree upon a successful merge into the index, so that
  98    subsequent "diff-index --cached" (hence "status") and "write-tree"
  99    (hence "commit") will go faster.
 100
 101    The same logic in "git checkout" may now be removed, but that is a
 102    separate issue.
 103
 104  * Tests that assume how reflogs are represented on the filesystem too
 105    much have been corrected.
 106
 107  * "git am" has been rewritten in "C".
 108
 109  * git_path() and mkpath() are handy helper functions but it is easy
 110    to misuse, as the callers need to be careful to keep the number of
 111    active results below 4.  Their uses have been reduced.
 112
 113
 114 Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
 115
 116
 117 Fixes since v2.5
 118 ----------------
 119
 120 Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.5 in the maintenance
 121 track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases'
 122 notes for details).
 123
 124  * "git subtree" (in contrib/) depended on "git log" output to be
 125    stable, which was a no-no.  Apply a workaround to force a
 126    particular date format.
 127    (merge e7aac44 da/subtree-date-confusion later to maint).
 128
 129  * An attempt to delete a ref by pushing into a repository whose HEAD
 130    symbolic reference points at an unborn branch that cannot be
 131    created due to ref D/F conflict (e.g. refs/heads/a/b exists, HEAD
 132    points at refs/heads/a) failed.
 133    (merge b112b14 jx/do-not-crash-receive-pack-wo-head later to maint).
 134
 135  * The low-level "git send-pack" did not honor 'user.signingkey'
 136    configuration variable when sending a signed-push.
 137    (merge d830d39 db/send-pack-user-signingkey later to maint).
 138
 139  * "sparse checkout" misbehaved for a path that is excluded from the
 140    checkout when switching between branches that differ at the path.
 141    (merge 7d78241 as/sparse-checkout-removal later to maint).
 142
 143  * An experimental "untracked cache" feature used uname(2) in a
 144    slightly unportable way.
 145    (merge 100e433 cb/uname-in-untracked later to maint).
 146
 147  * A "rebase" replays changes of the local branch on top of something
 148    else, as such they are placed in stage #3 and referred to as
 149    "theirs", while the changes in the new base, typically a foreign
 150    work, are placed in stage #2 and referred to as "ours".  Clarify
 151    the "checkout --ours/--theirs".
 152    (merge f303016 se/doc-checkout-ours-theirs later to maint).
 153
 154  * The "rev-parse --parseopt" mode parsed the option specification
 155    and the argument hint in a strange way to allow '=' and other
 156    special characters in the option name while forbidding them from
 157    the argument hint.  This made it impossible to define an option
 158    like "--pair <key>=<value>" with "pair=key=value" specification,
 159    which instead would have defined a "--pair=key <value>" option.
 160    (merge 2d893df ib/scripted-parse-opt-better-hint-string later to maint).
 161
 162  * Often a fast-import stream builds a new commit on top of the
 163    previous commit it built, and it often unconditionally emits a
 164    "from" command to specify the first parent, which can be omitted in
 165    such a case.  This caused fast-import to forget the tree of the
 166    previous commit and then re-read it from scratch, which was
 167    inefficient.  Optimize for this common case.
 168    (merge 0df3245 mh/fast-import-optimize-current-from later to maint).
 169
 170  * Running an aliased command from a subdirectory when the .git thing
 171    in the working tree is a gitfile pointing elsewhere did not work.
 172    (merge d95138e nd/export-worktree later to maint).
 173
 174  * "Is this subdirectory a separate repository that should not be
 175    touched?" check "git clean" was inefficient.  This was replaced
 176    with a more optimized check.
 177    (merge 38ae878 ee/clean-remove-dirs later to maint).
 178
 179  * The "new-worktree-mode" hack in "checkout" that was added in
 180    nd/multiple-work-trees topic has been removed by updating the
 181    implementation of new "worktree add".
 182    (merge 65f9b75 es/worktree-add-cleanup later to maint).
 183
 184  * Remove remaining cruft from  "git checkout --to", which
 185    transitioned to "git worktree add".
 186    (merge 114ff88 es/worktree-add later to maint).
 187
 188  * An off-by-one error made "git remote" to mishandle a remote with a
 189    single letter nickname.
 190    (merge bc598c3 mh/get-remote-group-fix later to maint).
 191
 192  * "git clone $URL", when cloning from a site whose sole purpose is to
 193    host a single repository (hence, no path after <scheme>://<site>/),
 194    tried to use the site name as the new repository name, but did not
 195    remove username or password when <site> part was of the form
 196    <user>@<pass>:<host>.  The code is taught to redact these.
 197    (merge adef956 ps/guess-repo-name-at-root later to maint).
 198
 199  * Running tests with the "-x" option to make them verbose had some
 200    unpleasant interactions with other features of the test suite.
 201    (merge 9b5fe78 jk/test-with-x later to maint).
 202
 203  * t1509 test that requires a dedicated VM environment had some
 204    bitrot, which has been corrected.
 205    (merge faacc5a ps/t1509-chroot-test-fixup later to maint).
 206
 207  * "git pull" in recent releases of Git has a regression in the code
 208    that allows custom path to the --upload-pack=<program>.  This has
 209    been corrected.
 210
 211    Note that this is irrelevant for 'master' with "git pull" rewritten
 212    in C.
 213    (merge 22d6857 mm/pull-upload-pack later to maint).
 214
 215  * Code cleanups and documentation updates.
 216    (merge 1c601af es/doc-clean-outdated-tools later to maint).
 217    (merge 3581304 kn/tag-doc-fix later to maint).
 218    (merge 3a59e59 kb/i18n-doc later to maint).
 219    (merge 45abdee sb/remove-unused-var-from-builtin-add later to maint).
 220    (merge 14691e3 sb/parse-options-codeformat later to maint).
 221    (merge 4a6ada3 ad/bisect-cleanup later to maint).
 222    (merge da4c5ad ta/docfix-index-format-tech later to maint).
 223    (merge ae25fd3 sb/check-return-from-read-ref later to maint).