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  * After "git am" without "-3" stops, running "git am -" pays attention
  60    to "-3" only for the patch that caused the original invocation
  61    to stop.
  62
  63  * When linked worktree is used, simultaneous "notes merge" instances
  64    for the same ref in refs/notes/* are prevented from stomping on
  65    each other.
  66
  67
  68 Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.
  69
  70  * In preparation for allowing different "backends" to store the refs
  71    in a way different from the traditional "one ref per file in
  72    $GIT_DIR or in a $GIT_DIR/packed-refs file" filesystem storage,
  73    direct filesystem access to ref-like things like CHERRY_PICK_HEAD
  74    from scripts and programs has been reduced.
  75
  76  * Computation of untracked status indicator by bash prompt
  77    script (in contrib/) has been optimized.
  78
  79  * Memory use reduction when commit-slab facility is used to annotate
  80    sparsely (which is not recommended in the first place).
  81
  82  * Clean up refs API and make "git clone" less intimate with the
  83    implementation detail.
  84
  85  * "git pull" was reimplemented in C.
  86
  87  * The packet tracing machinery allows to capture an incoming pack
  88    data to a file for debugging.
  89
  90  * Move machinery to parse human-readable scaled numbers like 1k, 4M,
  91    and 2G as an option parameter's value from pack-objects to
  92    parse-options API, to make it available to other codepaths.
  93
  94  * "git verify-tag" and "git verify-commit" have been taught to share
  95    more code, and then learned to optionally show the verification
  96    message from the underlying GPG implementation.
  97
  98  * Various enhancements around "git am" reading patches generated by
  99    foreign SCM have been made.
 100
 101  * Ref listing by "git branch -l" and "git tag -l" commands has
 102    started to be rebuilt, based on the for-each-ref machinery.
 103
 104  * The code to perform multi-tree merges has been taught to repopulate
 105    the cache-tree upon a successful merge into the index, so that
 106    subsequent "diff-index --cached" (hence "status") and "write-tree"
 107    (hence "commit") will go faster.
 108
 109    The same logic in "git checkout" may now be removed, but that is a
 110    separate issue.
 111
 112  * Tests that assume how reflogs are represented on the filesystem too
 113    much have been corrected.
 114
 115  * "git am" has been rewritten in "C".
 116
 117  * git_path() and mkpath() are handy helper functions but it is easy
 118    to misuse, as the callers need to be careful to keep the number of
 119    active results below 4.  Their uses have been reduced.
 120
 121  * The "lockfile" API has been rebuilt on top of a new "tempfile" API.
 122
 123  * To prepare for allowing a different "ref" backend to be plugged in
 124    to the system, update_ref()/delete_ref() have been taught about
 125    ref-like things like MERGE_HEAD that are per-worktree (they will
 126    always be written to the filesystem inside $GIT_DIR).
 127
 128
 129 Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
 130
 131
 132 Fixes since v2.5
 133 ----------------
 134
 135 Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.5 in the maintenance
 136 track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases'
 137 notes for details).
 138
 139  * "git subtree" (in contrib/) depended on "git log" output to be
 140    stable, which was a no-no.  Apply a workaround to force a
 141    particular date format.
 142    (merge e7aac44 da/subtree-date-confusion later to maint).
 143
 144  * An attempt to delete a ref by pushing into a repository whose HEAD
 145    symbolic reference points at an unborn branch that cannot be
 146    created due to ref D/F conflict (e.g. refs/heads/a/b exists, HEAD
 147    points at refs/heads/a) failed.
 148    (merge b112b14 jx/do-not-crash-receive-pack-wo-head later to maint).
 149
 150  * The low-level "git send-pack" did not honor 'user.signingkey'
 151    configuration variable when sending a signed-push.
 152    (merge d830d39 db/send-pack-user-signingkey later to maint).
 153
 154  * "sparse checkout" misbehaved for a path that is excluded from the
 155    checkout when switching between branches that differ at the path.
 156    (merge 7d78241 as/sparse-checkout-removal later to maint).
 157
 158  * An experimental "untracked cache" feature used uname(2) in a
 159    slightly unportable way.
 160    (merge 100e433 cb/uname-in-untracked later to maint).
 161
 162  * A "rebase" replays changes of the local branch on top of something
 163    else, as such they are placed in stage #3 and referred to as
 164    "theirs", while the changes in the new base, typically a foreign
 165    work, are placed in stage #2 and referred to as "ours".  Clarify
 166    the "checkout --ours/--theirs".
 167    (merge f303016 se/doc-checkout-ours-theirs later to maint).
 168
 169  * The "rev-parse --parseopt" mode parsed the option specification
 170    and the argument hint in a strange way to allow '=' and other
 171    special characters in the option name while forbidding them from
 172    the argument hint.  This made it impossible to define an option
 173    like "--pair <key>=<value>" with "pair=key=value" specification,
 174    which instead would have defined a "--pair=key <value>" option.
 175    (merge 2d893df ib/scripted-parse-opt-better-hint-string later to maint).
 176
 177  * Often a fast-import stream builds a new commit on top of the
 178    previous commit it built, and it often unconditionally emits a
 179    "from" command to specify the first parent, which can be omitted in
 180    such a case.  This caused fast-import to forget the tree of the
 181    previous commit and then re-read it from scratch, which was
 182    inefficient.  Optimize for this common case.
 183    (merge 0df3245 mh/fast-import-optimize-current-from later to maint).
 184
 185  * Running an aliased command from a subdirectory when the .git thing
 186    in the working tree is a gitfile pointing elsewhere did not work.
 187    (merge d95138e nd/export-worktree later to maint).
 188
 189  * "Is this subdirectory a separate repository that should not be
 190    touched?" check "git clean" was inefficient.  This was replaced
 191    with a more optimized check.
 192    (merge 38ae878 ee/clean-remove-dirs later to maint).
 193
 194  * The "new-worktree-mode" hack in "checkout" that was added in
 195    nd/multiple-work-trees topic has been removed by updating the
 196    implementation of new "worktree add".
 197    (merge 65f9b75 es/worktree-add-cleanup later to maint).
 198
 199  * Remove remaining cruft from  "git checkout --to", which
 200    transitioned to "git worktree add".
 201    (merge 114ff88 es/worktree-add later to maint).
 202
 203  * An off-by-one error made "git remote" to mishandle a remote with a
 204    single letter nickname.
 205    (merge bc598c3 mh/get-remote-group-fix later to maint).
 206
 207  * "git clone $URL", when cloning from a site whose sole purpose is to
 208    host a single repository (hence, no path after <scheme>://<site>/),
 209    tried to use the site name as the new repository name, but did not
 210    remove username or password when <site> part was of the form
 211    <user>@<pass>:<host>.  The code is taught to redact these.
 212    (merge adef956 ps/guess-repo-name-at-root later to maint).
 213
 214  * Running tests with the "-x" option to make them verbose had some
 215    unpleasant interactions with other features of the test suite.
 216    (merge 9b5fe78 jk/test-with-x later to maint).
 217
 218  * t1509 test that requires a dedicated VM environment had some
 219    bitrot, which has been corrected.
 220    (merge faacc5a ps/t1509-chroot-test-fixup later to maint).
 221
 222  * "git pull" in recent releases of Git has a regression in the code
 223    that allows custom path to the --upload-pack=<program>.  This has
 224    been corrected.
 225
 226    Note that this is irrelevant for 'master' with "git pull" rewritten
 227    in C.
 228    (merge 22d6857 mm/pull-upload-pack later to maint).
 229
 230  * When trying to see that an object does not exist, a state errno
 231    leaked from our "first try to open a packfile with O_NOATIME and
 232    then if it fails retry without it" logic on a system that refuses
 233    O_NOATIME.  This confused us and caused us to die, saying that the
 234    packfile is unreadable, when we should have just reported that the
 235    object does not exist in that packfile to the caller.
 236    (merge dff6f28 cb/open-noatime-clear-errno later to maint).
 237
 238  * The codepath to produce error messages had a hard-coded limit to
 239    the size of the message, primarily to avoid memory allocation while
 240    calling die().
 241    (merge f4c3edc jk/long-error-messages later to maint).
 242
 243  * strbuf_read() used to have one extra iteration (and an unnecessary
 244    strbuf_grow() of 8kB), which was eliminated.
 245    (merge 3ebbd00 jh/strbuf-read-use-read-in-full later to maint).
 246
 247  * Code cleanups and documentation updates.
 248    (merge 1c601af es/doc-clean-outdated-tools later to maint).
 249    (merge 3581304 kn/tag-doc-fix later to maint).
 250    (merge 3a59e59 kb/i18n-doc later to maint).
 251    (merge 45abdee sb/remove-unused-var-from-builtin-add later to maint).
 252    (merge 14691e3 sb/parse-options-codeformat later to maint).
 253    (merge 4a6ada3 ad/bisect-cleanup later to maint).
 254    (merge da4c5ad ta/docfix-index-format-tech later to maint).
 255    (merge ae25fd3 sb/check-return-from-read-ref later to maint).
 256    (merge b3325df nd/dwim-wildcards-as-pathspecs later to maint).