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  * "git send-email" learned a new option --smtp-auth to limit the SMTP
  68    AUTH mechanisms to be used to a subset of what the system library
  69    supports.
  70
  71  * A new configuration variable http.sslVersion can be used to specify
  72    what specific version of SSL/TLS to use to make a connection.
  73
  74
  75 Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.
  76
  77  * In preparation for allowing different "backends" to store the refs
  78    in a way different from the traditional "one ref per file in
  79    $GIT_DIR or in a $GIT_DIR/packed-refs file" filesystem storage,
  80    direct filesystem access to ref-like things like CHERRY_PICK_HEAD
  81    from scripts and programs has been reduced.
  82
  83  * Computation of untracked status indicator by bash prompt
  84    script (in contrib/) has been optimized.
  85
  86  * Memory use reduction when commit-slab facility is used to annotate
  87    sparsely (which is not recommended in the first place).
  88
  89  * Clean up refs API and make "git clone" less intimate with the
  90    implementation detail.
  91
  92  * "git pull" was reimplemented in C.
  93
  94  * The packet tracing machinery allows to capture an incoming pack
  95    data to a file for debugging.
  96
  97  * Move machinery to parse human-readable scaled numbers like 1k, 4M,
  98    and 2G as an option parameter's value from pack-objects to
  99    parse-options API, to make it available to other codepaths.
 100
 101  * "git verify-tag" and "git verify-commit" have been taught to share
 102    more code, and then learned to optionally show the verification
 103    message from the underlying GPG implementation.
 104
 105  * Various enhancements around "git am" reading patches generated by
 106    foreign SCM have been made.
 107
 108  * Ref listing by "git branch -l" and "git tag -l" commands has
 109    started to be rebuilt, based on the for-each-ref machinery.
 110
 111  * The code to perform multi-tree merges has been taught to repopulate
 112    the cache-tree upon a successful merge into the index, so that
 113    subsequent "diff-index --cached" (hence "status") and "write-tree"
 114    (hence "commit") will go faster.
 115
 116    The same logic in "git checkout" may now be removed, but that is a
 117    separate issue.
 118
 119  * Tests that assume how reflogs are represented on the filesystem too
 120    much have been corrected.
 121
 122  * "git am" has been rewritten in "C".
 123
 124  * git_path() and mkpath() are handy helper functions but it is easy
 125    to misuse, as the callers need to be careful to keep the number of
 126    active results below 4.  Their uses have been reduced.
 127
 128  * The "lockfile" API has been rebuilt on top of a new "tempfile" API.
 129
 130  * To prepare for allowing a different "ref" backend to be plugged in
 131    to the system, update_ref()/delete_ref() have been taught about
 132    ref-like things like MERGE_HEAD that are per-worktree (they will
 133    always be written to the filesystem inside $GIT_DIR).
 134
 135
 136 Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
 137
 138
 139 Fixes since v2.5
 140 ----------------
 141
 142 Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.5 in the maintenance
 143 track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases'
 144 notes for details).
 145
 146  * "git subtree" (in contrib/) depended on "git log" output to be
 147    stable, which was a no-no.  Apply a workaround to force a
 148    particular date format.
 149    (merge e7aac44 da/subtree-date-confusion later to maint).
 150
 151  * An attempt to delete a ref by pushing into a repository whose HEAD
 152    symbolic reference points at an unborn branch that cannot be
 153    created due to ref D/F conflict (e.g. refs/heads/a/b exists, HEAD
 154    points at refs/heads/a) failed.
 155    (merge b112b14 jx/do-not-crash-receive-pack-wo-head later to maint).
 156
 157  * The low-level "git send-pack" did not honor 'user.signingkey'
 158    configuration variable when sending a signed-push.
 159    (merge d830d39 db/send-pack-user-signingkey later to maint).
 160
 161  * "sparse checkout" misbehaved for a path that is excluded from the
 162    checkout when switching between branches that differ at the path.
 163    (merge 7d78241 as/sparse-checkout-removal later to maint).
 164
 165  * An experimental "untracked cache" feature used uname(2) in a
 166    slightly unportable way.
 167    (merge 100e433 cb/uname-in-untracked later to maint).
 168
 169  * A "rebase" replays changes of the local branch on top of something
 170    else, as such they are placed in stage #3 and referred to as
 171    "theirs", while the changes in the new base, typically a foreign
 172    work, are placed in stage #2 and referred to as "ours".  Clarify
 173    the "checkout --ours/--theirs".
 174    (merge f303016 se/doc-checkout-ours-theirs later to maint).
 175
 176  * The "rev-parse --parseopt" mode parsed the option specification
 177    and the argument hint in a strange way to allow '=' and other
 178    special characters in the option name while forbidding them from
 179    the argument hint.  This made it impossible to define an option
 180    like "--pair <key>=<value>" with "pair=key=value" specification,
 181    which instead would have defined a "--pair=key <value>" option.
 182    (merge 2d893df ib/scripted-parse-opt-better-hint-string later to maint).
 183
 184  * Often a fast-import stream builds a new commit on top of the
 185    previous commit it built, and it often unconditionally emits a
 186    "from" command to specify the first parent, which can be omitted in
 187    such a case.  This caused fast-import to forget the tree of the
 188    previous commit and then re-read it from scratch, which was
 189    inefficient.  Optimize for this common case.
 190    (merge 0df3245 mh/fast-import-optimize-current-from later to maint).
 191
 192  * Running an aliased command from a subdirectory when the .git thing
 193    in the working tree is a gitfile pointing elsewhere did not work.
 194    (merge d95138e nd/export-worktree later to maint).
 195
 196  * "Is this subdirectory a separate repository that should not be
 197    touched?" check "git clean" was inefficient.  This was replaced
 198    with a more optimized check.
 199    (merge 38ae878 ee/clean-remove-dirs later to maint).
 200
 201  * The "new-worktree-mode" hack in "checkout" that was added in
 202    nd/multiple-work-trees topic has been removed by updating the
 203    implementation of new "worktree add".
 204    (merge 65f9b75 es/worktree-add-cleanup later to maint).
 205
 206  * Remove remaining cruft from  "git checkout --to", which
 207    transitioned to "git worktree add".
 208    (merge 114ff88 es/worktree-add later to maint).
 209
 210  * An off-by-one error made "git remote" to mishandle a remote with a
 211    single letter nickname.
 212    (merge bc598c3 mh/get-remote-group-fix later to maint).
 213
 214  * "git clone $URL", when cloning from a site whose sole purpose is to
 215    host a single repository (hence, no path after <scheme>://<site>/),
 216    tried to use the site name as the new repository name, but did not
 217    remove username or password when <site> part was of the form
 218    <user>@<pass>:<host>.  The code is taught to redact these.
 219    (merge adef956 ps/guess-repo-name-at-root later to maint).
 220
 221  * Running tests with the "-x" option to make them verbose had some
 222    unpleasant interactions with other features of the test suite.
 223    (merge 9b5fe78 jk/test-with-x later to maint).
 224
 225  * t1509 test that requires a dedicated VM environment had some
 226    bitrot, which has been corrected.
 227    (merge faacc5a ps/t1509-chroot-test-fixup later to maint).
 228
 229  * "git pull" in recent releases of Git has a regression in the code
 230    that allows custom path to the --upload-pack=<program>.  This has
 231    been corrected.
 232
 233    Note that this is irrelevant for 'master' with "git pull" rewritten
 234    in C.
 235    (merge 22d6857 mm/pull-upload-pack later to maint).
 236
 237  * When trying to see that an object does not exist, a state errno
 238    leaked from our "first try to open a packfile with O_NOATIME and
 239    then if it fails retry without it" logic on a system that refuses
 240    O_NOATIME.  This confused us and caused us to die, saying that the
 241    packfile is unreadable, when we should have just reported that the
 242    object does not exist in that packfile to the caller.
 243    (merge dff6f28 cb/open-noatime-clear-errno later to maint).
 244
 245  * The codepath to produce error messages had a hard-coded limit to
 246    the size of the message, primarily to avoid memory allocation while
 247    calling die().
 248    (merge f4c3edc jk/long-error-messages later to maint).
 249
 250  * strbuf_read() used to have one extra iteration (and an unnecessary
 251    strbuf_grow() of 8kB), which was eliminated.
 252    (merge 3ebbd00 jh/strbuf-read-use-read-in-full later to maint).
 253
 254  * We rewrote one of the build scripts in Perl but this reimplements
 255    in Bourne shell.
 256    (merge 82aec45 sg/help-group later to maint).
 257
 258  * The experimental untracked-cache feature were buggy when paths with
 259    a few levels of subdirectories are involved.
 260    (merge 73f9145 dt/untracked-subdir later to maint).
 261
 262  * "interpret-trailers" helper mistook a single-liner log message that
 263    has a colon as the end of existing trailer.
 264    (merge 6262fe9 cc/trailers-corner-case-fix later to maint).
 265
 266  * Code cleanups and documentation updates.
 267    (merge 1c601af es/doc-clean-outdated-tools later to maint).
 268    (merge 3581304 kn/tag-doc-fix later to maint).
 269    (merge 3a59e59 kb/i18n-doc later to maint).
 270    (merge 45abdee sb/remove-unused-var-from-builtin-add later to maint).
 271    (merge 14691e3 sb/parse-options-codeformat later to maint).
 272    (merge 4a6ada3 ad/bisect-cleanup later to maint).
 273    (merge da4c5ad ta/docfix-index-format-tech later to maint).
 274    (merge ae25fd3 sb/check-return-from-read-ref later to maint).
 275    (merge b3325df nd/dwim-wildcards-as-pathspecs later to maint).
 276    (merge 7aa9b9b sg/wt-status-header-inclusion later to maint).
 277    (merge f04c690 as/docfix-reflog-expire-unreachable later to maint).
 278    (merge 1269847 sg/t3020-typofix later to maint).
 279    (merge 8b54c23 jc/calloc-pathspec later to maint).
 280    (merge a6926b8 po/po-readme later to maint).
 281    (merge 54d160e ss/fix-config-fd-leak later to maint).