Git 2.6 Release Notes ===================== Updates since v2.5 ------------------ UI, Workflows & Features * An asterisk as a substring (as opposed to the entirety) of a path component for both side of a refspec, e.g. "refs/heads/o*:refs/remotes/heads/i*", is now allowed. * New userdiff pattern definition for fountain screenwriting markup format has been added. * "git log" and friends learned a new "--date=format:..." option to format timestamps using system's strftime(3). * "git fast-import" learned to respond to the get-mark command via its cat-blob-fd interface. * "git rebase -i" learned "drop commit-object-name subject" command as another way to skip replaying of a commit. * A new configuration variable can enable "--follow" automatically when "git log" is run with one pathspec argument. * "git status" learned to show a more detailed information regarding the "rebase -i" session in progress. * "git cat-file" learned "--batch-all-objects" option to enumerate all available objects in the repository more quickly than "rev-list --all --objects" (the output includes unreachable objects, though). * "git fsck" learned to ignore errors on a set of known-to-be-bad objects, and also allows the warning levels of various kinds of non-critical breakages to be tweaked. * "git rebase -i"'s list of todo is made configurable. * "git send-email" now performs alias-expansion on names that are given via --cccmd, etc. * An environment variable GIT_REPLACE_REF_BASE tells Git to look into refs hierarchy other than refs/replace/ for the object replacement data. * Allow untracked cache (experimental) to be used when sparse checkout (experimental) is also in use. * "git pull --rebase" has been taught to pay attention to rebase.autostash configuration. Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc. * In preparation for allowing different "backends" to store the refs in a way different from the traditional "one ref per file in $GIT_DIR or in a $GIT_DIR/packed-refs file" filesystem storage, direct filesystem access to ref-like things like CHERRY_PICK_HEAD from scripts and programs has been reduced. * Computation of untracked status indicator by bash prompt script (in contrib/) has been optimized. * Memory use reduction when commit-slab facility is used to annotate sparsely (which is not recommended in the first place). * Clean up refs API and make "git clone" less intimate with the implementation detail. * "git pull" was reimplemented in C. * The packet tracing machinery allows to capture an incoming pack data to a file for debugging. * Move machinery to parse human-readable scaled numbers like 1k, 4M, and 2G as an option parameter's value from pack-objects to parse-options API, to make it available to other codepaths. * "git verify-tag" and "git verify-commit" have been taught to share more code, and then learned to optionally show the verification message from the underlying GPG implementation. * Various enhancements around "git am" reading patches generated by foreign SCM have been made. * Ref listing by "git branch -l" and "git tag -l" commands has started to be rebuilt, based on the for-each-ref machinery. * The code to perform multi-tree merges has been taught to repopulate the cache-tree upon a successful merge into the index, so that subsequent "diff-index --cached" (hence "status") and "write-tree" (hence "commit") will go faster. The same logic in "git checkout" may now be removed, but that is a separate issue. * Tests that assume how reflogs are represented on the filesystem too much have been corrected. * "git am" has been rewritten in "C". Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups. Fixes since v2.5 ---------------- Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.5 in the maintenance track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases' notes for details). * "git subtree" (in contrib/) depended on "git log" output to be stable, which was a no-no. Apply a workaround to force a particular date format. (merge e7aac44 da/subtree-date-confusion later to maint). * An attempt to delete a ref by pushing into a repositorywhose HEAD symbolic reference points at an unborn branch that cannot be created due to ref D/F conflict (e.g. refs/heads/a/b exists, HEAD points at refs/heads/a) failed. (merge b112b14 jx/do-not-crash-receive-pack-wo-head later to maint). * The low-level "git send-pack" did not honor 'user.signingkey' configuration variable when sending a signed-push. (merge d830d39 db/send-pack-user-signingkey later to maint). * "sparse checkout" misbehaved for a path that is excluded from the checkout when switching between branches that differ at the path. (merge 7d78241 as/sparse-checkout-removal later to maint). * An experimental "untracked cache" feature used uname(2) in a slightly unportable way. (merge 100e433 cb/uname-in-untracked later to maint). * A "rebase" replays changes of the local branch on top of something else, as such they are placed in stage #3 and referred to as "theirs", while the changes in the new base, typically a foreign work, are placed in stage #2 and referred to as "ours". Clarify the "checkout --ours/--theirs". (merge f303016 se/doc-checkout-ours-theirs later to maint). * The "rev-parse --parseopt" mode parsed the option specification and the argument hint in a strange way to allow '=' and other special characters in the option name while forbidding them from the argument hint. This made it impossible to define an option like "--pair =" with "pair=key=value" specification, which instead would have defined a "--pair=key " option. (merge 2d893df ib/scripted-parse-opt-better-hint-string later to maint). * Often a fast-import stream builds a new commit on top of the previous commit it built, and it often unconditionally emits a "from" command to specify the first parent, which can be omitted in such a case. This caused fast-import to forget the tree of the previous commit and then re-read it from scratch, which was inefficient. Optimize for this common case. (merge 0df3245 mh/fast-import-optimize-current-from later to maint). * Running an aliased command from a subdirectory when the .git thing in the working tree is a gitfile pointing elsewhere did not work. (merge d95138e nd/export-worktree later to maint). * "Is this subdirectory a separate repository that should not be touched?" check "git clean" was inefficient. This was replaced with a more optimized check. (merge 38ae878 ee/clean-remove-dirs later to maint). * The "new-worktree-mode" hack in "checkout" that was added in nd/multiple-work-trees topic has been removed by updating the implementation of new "worktree add". (merge 65f9b75 es/worktree-add-cleanup later to maint). * Remove remaining cruft from "git checkout --to", which transitioned to "git worktree add". (merge 114ff88 es/worktree-add later to maint). * An off-by-one error made "git remote" to mishandle a remote with a single letter nickname. (merge bc598c3 mh/get-remote-group-fix later to maint). * Code cleanups and documentation updates. (merge 1c601af es/doc-clean-outdated-tools later to maint). (merge 3581304 kn/tag-doc-fix later to maint). (merge 3a59e59 kb/i18n-doc later to maint). (merge 45abdee sb/remove-unused-var-from-builtin-add later to maint). (merge 14691e3 sb/parse-options-codeformat later to maint). (merge 4a6ada3 ad/bisect-cleanup later to maint). (merge da4c5ad ta/docfix-index-format-tech later to maint).