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[thirdparty/git.git] / Documentation / RelNotes / 2.10.0.txt
1 Git 2.10 Release Notes
2 ======================
3
4 Backward compatibility notes
5 ----------------------------
6
7 Updates since v2.9
8 ------------------
9
10 UI, Workflows & Features
11
12 * "git pull --rebase --verify-signature" learned to warn the user
13 that "--verify-signature" is a no-op when rebasing.
14
15 * An upstream project can make a recommendation to shallowly clone
16 some submodules in the .gitmodules file it ships.
17
18 * "git worktree add" learned that '-' can be used as a short-hand for
19 "@{-1}", the previous branch.
20
21 * Update the funcname definition to support css files.
22
23 * The completion script (in contrib/) learned to complete "git
24 status" options.
25
26 * Messages that are generated by auto gc during "git push" on the
27 receiving end are now passed back to the sending end in such a way
28 that they are shown with "remote: " prefix to avoid confusing the
29 users.
30
31 * "git add -i/-p" learned to honor diff.compactionHeuristic
32 experimental knob, so that the user can work on the same hunk split
33 as "git diff" output.
34
35 * "upload-pack" allows a custom "git pack-objects" replacement when
36 responding to "fetch/clone" via the uploadpack.packObjectsHook.
37 (merge b738396 jk/upload-pack-hook later to maint).
38
39 * Teach format-patch and mailsplit (hence "am") how a line that
40 happens to begin with "From " in the e-mail message is quoted with
41 ">", so that these lines can be restored to their original shape.
42 (merge d9925d1 ew/mboxrd-format-am later to maint).
43
44 * "git repack" learned the "--keep-unreachable" option, which sends
45 loose unreachable objects to a pack instead of leaving them loose.
46 This helps heuristics based on the number of loose objects
47 (e.g. "gc --auto").
48 (merge e26a8c4 jk/repack-keep-unreachable later to maint).
49
50 * "log --graph --format=" learned that "%>|(N)" specifies the width
51 relative to the terminal's left edge, not relative to the area to
52 draw text that is to the right of the ancestry-graph section. It
53 also now accepts negative N that means the column limit is relative
54 to the right border.
55
56 * A careless invocation of "git send-email directory/" after editing
57 0001-change.patch with an editor often ends up sending both
58 0001-change.patch and its backup file, 0001-change.patch~, causing
59 embarrassment and a minor confusion. Detect such an input and
60 offer to skip the backup files when sending the patches out.
61 (merge 531220b jc/send-email-skip-backup later to maint).
62
63 * "git submodule update" that drives many "git clone" could
64 eventually hit flaky servers/network conditions on one of the
65 submodules; the command learned to retry the attempt.
66
67 * The output coloring scheme learned two new attributes, italic and
68 strike, in addition to existing bold, reverse, etc.
69
70 * "git log" learns log.showSignature configuration variable, and a
71 command line option "--no-show-signature" to countermand it.
72 (merge fce04c3 mj/log-show-signature-conf later to maint).
73
74 * More markings of messages for i18n, with updates to various tests
75 to pass GETTEXT_POISON tests.
76
77 * "git archive" learned to handle files that are larger than 8GB and
78 commits far in the future than expressible by the traditional US-TAR
79 format.
80 (merge 560b0e8 jk/big-and-future-archive-tar later to maint).
81
82
83 * A new configuration variable core.sshCommand has been added to
84 specify what value for GIT_SSH_COMMAND to use per repository.
85
86 * "git worktree prune" protected worktrees that are marked as
87 "locked" by creating a file in a known location. "git worktree"
88 command learned a dedicated command pair to create and remove such
89 a file, so that the users do not have to do this with editor.
90
91 * A handful of "git svn" updates.
92
93 * "git push" learned to accept and pass extra options to the
94 receiving end so that hooks can read and react to them.
95
96 * "git status" learned to suggest "merge --abort" during a conflicted
97 merge, just like it already suggests "rebase --abort" during a
98 conflicted rebase.
99
100 * "git jump" script (in contrib/) has been updated a bit.
101 (merge a91e692 jk/git-jump later to maint).
102
103 * "git push" and "git clone" learned to give better progress meters
104 to the end user who is waiting on the terminal.
105
106 * An entry "git log --decorate" for the tip of the current branch is
107 shown as "HEAD -> name" (where "name" is the name of the branch);
108 the arrow is now painted in the same color as "HEAD", not in the
109 color for commits.
110
111 * "git format-patch" learned format.from configuration variable to
112 specify the default settings for its "--from" option.
113
114 * "git am -3" calls "git merge-recursive" when it needs to fall back
115 to a three-way merge; this call has been turned into an internal
116 subroutine call instead of spawning a separate subprocess.
117
118 * The command line completion scripts (in contrib/) now knows about
119 "git branch --delete/--move [--remote]".
120 (merge 2703c22 vs/completion-branch-fully-spelled-d-m-r later to maint).
121
122 * "git rev-parse --git-path hooks/<hook>" learned to take
123 core.hooksPath configuration variable (introduced during 2.9 cycle)
124 into account.
125 (merge 9445b49 ab/hooks later to maint).
126
127 * "git log --show-signature" and other commands that display the
128 verification status of PGP signature now shows the longer key-id,
129 as 32-bit key-id is so last century.
130
131
132 Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.
133
134 * "git fast-import" learned the same performance trick to avoid
135 creating too small a packfile as "git fetch" and "git push" have,
136 using *.unpackLimit configuration.
137
138 * When "git daemon" is run without --[init-]timeout specified, a
139 connection from a client that silently goes offline can hang around
140 for a long time, wasting resources. The socket-level KEEPALIVE has
141 been enabled to allow the OS to notice such failed connections.
142
143 * "git upload-pack" command has been updated to use the parse-options
144 API.
145
146 * The "git apply" standalone program is being libified; the first
147 step to move many state variables into a structure that can be
148 explicitly (re)initialized to make the machinery callable more
149 than once has been merged.
150
151 * HTTP transport gained an option to produce more detailed debugging
152 trace.
153 (merge 73e57aa ep/http-curl-trace later to maint).
154
155 * Instead of taking advantage of the fact that a struct string_list
156 that is allocated with all NULs happens to be the INIT_NODUP kind,
157 the users of string_list structures are taught to initialize them
158 explicitly as such, to document their behaviour better.
159 (merge 2721ce2 jk/string-list-static-init later to maint).
160
161 * HTTPd tests learned to show the server error log to help diagnosing
162 a failing tests.
163 (merge 44f243d nd/test-lib-httpd-show-error-log-in-verbose later to maint).
164
165 * The ownership rule for the piece of memory that hold references to
166 be fetched in "git fetch" was screwy, which has been cleaned up.
167
168 * "git bisect" makes an internal call to "git diff-tree" when
169 bisection finds the culprit, but this call did not initialize the
170 data structure to pass to the diff-tree API correctly.
171
172 * Further preparatory clean-up for "worktree" feature continues.
173 (merge 0409e0b nd/worktree-cleanup-post-head-protection later to maint).
174
175 * Formats of the various data (and how to validate them) where we use
176 GPG signature have been documented.
177
178 * A new run-command API function pipe_command() is introduced to
179 sanely feed data to the standard input while capturing data from
180 the standard output and the standard error of an external process,
181 which is cumbersome to hand-roll correctly without deadlocking.
182
183 * The codepath to sign data in a prepared buffer with GPG has been
184 updated to use this API to read from the status-fd to check for
185 errors (instead of relying on GPG's exit status).
186 (merge efee955 jk/gpg-interface-cleanup later to maint).
187
188 * Allow t/perf framework to use the features from the most recent
189 version of Git even when testing an older installed version.
190
191 * The commands in the "log/diff" family have had an FILE* pointer in the
192 data structure they pass around for a long time, but some codepaths
193 used to always write to the standard output. As a preparatory step
194 to make "git format-patch" available to the internal callers, these
195 codepaths have been updated to consistently write into that FILE*
196 instead.
197
198 * Conversion from unsigned char sha1[20] to struct object_id
199 continues.
200
201 * Improve the look of the way "git fetch" reports what happened to
202 each ref that was fetched.
203
204 * The .c/.h sources are marked as such in our .gitattributes file so
205 that "git diff -W" and friends would work better.
206
207 * Code clean-up to avoid using a variable string that compilers may
208 feel untrustable as printf-style format given to write_file()
209 helper function.
210
211 * "git p4" used a location outside $GIT_DIR/refs/ to place its
212 temporary branches, which has been moved to refs/git-p4-tmp/.
213
214 * Existing autoconf generated test for the need to link with pthread
215 library did not check all the functions from pthread libraries;
216 recent FreeBSD has some functions in libc but not others, and we
217 mistakenly thought linking with libc is enough when it is not.
218
219 * When "git fsck" reports a broken link (e.g. a tree object contains
220 a blob that does not exist), both containing object and the object
221 that is referred to were reported with their 40-hex object names.
222 The command learned the "--name-objects" option to show the path to
223 the containing object from existing refs (e.g. "HEAD~24^2:file.txt").
224
225 * Allow http daemon tests in Travis CI tests.
226
227 * Makefile assumed that -lrt is always available on platforms that
228 want to use clock_gettime() and CLOCK_MONOTONIC, which is not a
229 case for recent Mac OS X. The necessary symbols are often found in
230 libc on many modern systems and having -lrt on the command line, as
231 long as the library exists, had no effect, but when the platform
232 removes librt.a that is a different matter--having -lrt will break
233 the linkage.
234
235 This change could be seen as a regression for those who do need to
236 specify -lrt, as they now specifically ask for NEEDS_LIBRT when
237 building. Hopefully they are in the minority these days.
238
239 * Further preparatory work on the refs API before the pluggable
240 backend series can land.
241
242 * Error handling in the codepaths that updates refs has been
243 improved.
244
245 * The API to iterate over all the refs (i.e. for_each_ref(), etc.)
246 has been revamped.
247
248 * The handling of the "text=auto" attribute has been corrected.
249 $ echo "* text=auto eol=crlf" >.gitattributes
250 used to have the same effect as
251 $ echo "* text eol=crlf" >.gitattributes
252 i.e. declaring all files are text (ignoring "auto"). The
253 combination has been fixed to be equivalent to doing
254 $ git config core.autocrlf true
255
256 * Documentation has been updated to show better example usage
257 of the updated "text=auto" attribute.
258
259 * A few tests that specifically target "git rebase -i" have been
260 added.
261
262 * Dumb http transport on the client side has been optimized.
263 (merge ecba195 ew/http-walker later to maint).
264
265 * Users of the parse_options_concat() API function need to allocate
266 extra slots in advance and fill them with OPT_END() when they want
267 to decide the set of supported options dynamically, which makes the
268 code error-prone and hard to read. This has been corrected by tweaking
269 the API to allocate and return a new copy of "struct option" array.
270
271 * "git fetch" exchanges batched have/ack messages between the sender
272 and the receiver, initially doubling every time and then falling
273 back to enlarge the window size linearly. The "smart http"
274 transport, being an half-duplex protocol, outgrows the preset limit
275 too quickly and becomes inefficient when interacting with a large
276 repository. The internal mechanism learned to grow the window size
277 more aggressively when working with the "smart http" transport.
278
279 * Tests for "git svn" have been taught to reuse the lib-httpd test
280 infrastructure when testing the subversion integration that
281 interacts with subversion repositories served over the http://
282 protocol.
283 (merge a8a5d25 ew/git-svn-http-tests later to maint).
284
285 * "git pack-objects" has a few options that tell it not to pack
286 objects found in certain packfiles, which require it to scan .idx
287 files of all available packs. The codepaths involved in these
288 operations have been optimized for a common case of not having any
289 non-local pack and/or any .kept pack.
290
291 * The t3700 test about "add --chmod=-x" have been made a bit more
292 robust and generally cleaned up.
293 (merge 766cdc4 ib/t3700-add-chmod-x-updates later to maint).
294
295 * The build procedure learned PAGER_ENV knob that lists what default
296 environment variable settings to export for popular pagers. This
297 mechanism is used to tweak the default settings to MORE on FreeBSD.
298 (merge 995bc22 ew/build-time-pager-tweaks later to maint).
299
300 * The http-backend (the server-side component of smart-http
301 transport) used to trickle the HTTP header one at a time. Now
302 these write(2)s are batched.
303 (merge b36045c ew/http-backend-batch-headers later to maint).
304
305 * When "git rebase" tries to compare set of changes on the updated
306 upstream and our own branch, it computes patch-id for all of these
307 changes and attempts to find matches. This has been optimized by
308 lazily computing the full patch-id (which is expensive) to be
309 compared only for changes that touch the same set of paths.
310 (merge ba67504 kw/patch-ids-optim later to maint).
311
312 * A handful of tests that were broken under gettext-poison build have
313 been fixed.
314
315 * The recent i18n patch we added during this cycle did a bit too much
316 refactoring of the messages to avoid word-legos; the repetition has
317 been reduced to help translators.
318
319
320 Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
321
322
323 Fixes since v2.9
324 ----------------
325
326 Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.8 in the maintenance
327 track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases'
328 notes for details).
329
330 * The commands in `git log` family take %C(auto) in a custom format
331 string. This unconditionally turned the color on, ignoring
332 --no-color or with --color=auto when the output is not connected to
333 a tty; this was corrected to make the format truly behave as
334 "auto".
335
336 * "git rev-list --count" whose walk-length is limited with "-n"
337 option did not work well with the counting optimized to look at the
338 bitmap index.
339
340 * "git show -W" (extend hunks to cover the entire function, delimited
341 by lines that match the "funcname" pattern) used to show the entire
342 file when a change added an entire function at the end of the file,
343 which has been fixed.
344
345 * The documentation set has been updated so that literal commands,
346 configuration variables and environment variables are consistently
347 typeset in fixed-width font and bold in manpages.
348
349 * "git svn propset" subcommand that was added in 2.3 days is
350 documented now.
351
352 * The documentation tries to consistently spell "GPG"; when
353 referring to the specific program name, "gpg" is used.
354
355 * "git reflog" stopped upon seeing an entry that denotes a branch
356 creation event (aka "unborn"), which made it appear as if the
357 reflog was truncated.
358
359 * The git-prompt scriptlet (in contrib/) was not friendly with those
360 who uses "set -u", which has been fixed.
361
362 * compat/regex code did not cleanly compile.
363
364 * A codepath that used alloca(3) to place an unbounded amount of data
365 on the stack has been updated to avoid doing so.
366
367 * "git update-index --add --chmod=+x file" may be usable as an escape
368 hatch, but not a friendly thing to force for people who do need to
369 use it regularly. "git add --chmod=+x file" can be used instead.
370
371 * Build improvements for gnome-keyring (in contrib/)
372
373 * "git status" used to say "working directory" when it meant "working
374 tree".
375
376 * Comments about misbehaving FreeBSD shells have been clarified with
377 the version number (9.x and before are broken, newer ones are OK).
378
379 * "git cherry-pick A" worked on an unborn branch, but "git
380 cherry-pick A..B" didn't.
381
382 * Fix an unintended regression in v2.9 that breaks "clone --depth"
383 that recurses down to submodules by forcing the submodules to also
384 be cloned shallowly, which many server instances that host upstream
385 of the submodules are not prepared for.
386
387 * Fix unnecessarily waste in the idiomatic use of ': ${VAR=default}'
388 to set the default value, without enclosing it in double quotes.
389
390 * Some platform-specific code had non-ANSI strict declarations of C
391 functions that do not take any parameters, which has been
392 corrected.
393
394 * The internal code used to show local timezone offset is not
395 prepared to handle timestamps beyond year 2100, and gave a
396 bogus offset value to the caller. Use a more benign looking
397 +0000 instead and let "git log" going in such a case, instead
398 of aborting.
399
400 * One among four invocations of readlink(1) in our test suite has
401 been rewritten so that the test can run on systems without the
402 command (others are in valgrind test framework and t9802).
403
404 * t/perf needs /usr/bin/time with GNU extension; the invocation of it
405 is updated to "gtime" on Darwin.
406
407 * A bug, which caused "git p4" while running under verbose mode to
408 report paths that are omitted due to branch prefix incorrectly, has
409 been fixed; the command said "Ignoring file outside of prefix" for
410 paths that are _inside_.
411
412 * The top level documentation "git help git" still pointed at the
413 documentation set hosted at now-defunct google-code repository.
414 Update it to point to https://git.github.io/htmldocs/git.html
415 instead.
416
417 * A helper function that takes the contents of a commit object and
418 finds its subject line did not ignore leading blank lines, as is
419 commonly done by other codepaths. Make it ignore leading blank
420 lines to match.
421
422 * For a long time, we carried an in-code comment that said our
423 colored output would work only when we use fprintf/fputs on
424 Windows, which no longer is the case for the past few years.
425
426 * "gc.autoPackLimit" when set to 1 should not trigger a repacking
427 when there is only one pack, but the code counted poorly and did
428 so.
429
430 * Add a test to specify the desired behaviour that currently is not
431 available in "git rebase -Xsubtree=...".
432
433 * More mark-up updates to typeset strings that are expected to
434 literally typed by the end user in fixed-width font.
435
436 * "git commit --amend --allow-empty-message -S" for a commit without
437 any message body could have misidentified where the header of the
438 commit object ends.
439
440 * "git rebase -i --autostash" did not restore the auto-stashed change
441 when the operation was aborted.
442
443 * Git does not know what the contents in the index should be for a
444 path added with "git add -N" yet, so "git grep --cached" should not
445 show hits (or show lack of hits, with -L) in such a path, but that
446 logic does not apply to "git grep", i.e. searching in the working
447 tree files. But we did so by mistake, which has been corrected.
448
449 * "git blame -M" missed a single line that was moved within the file.
450
451 * Fix recently introduced codepaths that are involved in parallel
452 submodule operations, which gave up on reading too early, and
453 could have wasted CPU while attempting to write under a corner
454 case condition.
455
456 * "git grep -i" has been taught to fold case in non-ascii locales
457 correctly.
458
459 * A test that unconditionally used "mktemp" learned that the command
460 is not necessarily available everywhere.
461
462 * There are certain house-keeping tasks that need to be performed at
463 the very beginning of any Git program, and programs that are not
464 built-in commands had to do them exactly the same way as "git"
465 potty does. It was easy to make mistakes in one-off standalone
466 programs (like test helpers). A common "main()" function that
467 calls cmd_main() of individual program has been introduced to
468 make it harder to make mistakes.
469 (merge de61ceb jk/common-main later to maint).
470
471 * The test framework learned a new helper test_match_signal to
472 check an exit code from getting killed by an expected signal.
473
474 * General code clean-up around a helper function to write a
475 single-liner to a file.
476 (merge 7eb6e10 jk/write-file later to maint).
477
478 * One part of "git am" had an oddball helper function that called
479 stuff from outside "his" as opposed to calling what we have "ours",
480 which was not gender-neutral and also inconsistent with the rest of
481 the system where outside stuff is usuall called "theirs" in
482 contrast to "ours".
483
484 * "git blame file" allowed the lineage of lines in the uncommitted,
485 unadded contents of "file" to be inspected, but it refused when
486 "file" did not appear in the current commit. When "file" was
487 created by renaming an existing file (but the change has not been
488 committed), this restriction was unnecessarily tight.
489
490 * "git add -N dir/file && git write-tree" produced an incorrect tree
491 when there are other paths in the same directory that sorts after
492 "file".
493
494 * "git fetch http://user:pass@host/repo..." scrubbed the userinfo
495 part, but "git push" didn't.
496
497 * "git merge" with renormalization did not work well with
498 merge-recursive, due to "safer crlf" conversion kicking in when it
499 shouldn't.
500 (merge 1335d76 jc/renormalize-merge-kill-safer-crlf later to maint).
501
502 * The use of strbuf in "git rm" to build filename to remove was a bit
503 suboptimal, which has been fixed.
504
505 * An age old bug that caused "git diff --ignore-space-at-eol"
506 misbehave has been fixed.
507
508 * "git notes merge" had a code to see if a path exists (and fails if
509 it does) and then open the path for writing (when it doesn't).
510 Replace it with open with O_EXCL.
511
512 * "git pack-objects" and "git index-pack" mostly operate with off_t
513 when talking about the offset of objects in a packfile, but there
514 were a handful of places that used "unsigned long" to hold that
515 value, leading to an unintended truncation.
516
517 * Recent update to "git daemon" tries to enable the socket-level
518 KEEPALIVE, but when it is spawned via inetd, the standard input
519 file descriptor may not necessarily be connected to a socket.
520 Suppress an ENOTSOCK error from setsockopt().
521
522 * Recent FreeBSD stopped making perl available at /usr/bin/perl;
523 switch the default the built-in path to /usr/local/bin/perl on not
524 too ancient FreeBSD releases.
525
526 * "git commit --help" said "--no-verify" is only about skipping the
527 pre-commit hook, and failed to say that it also skipped the
528 commit-msg hook.
529
530 * "git merge" in Git v2.9 was taught to forbid merging an unrelated
531 lines of history by default, but that is exactly the kind of thing
532 the "--rejoin" mode of "git subtree" (in contrib/) wants to do.
533 "git subtree" has been taught to use the "--allow-unrelated-histories"
534 option to override the default.
535
536 * The build procedure for "git persistent-https" helper (in contrib/)
537 has been updated so that it can be built with more recent versions
538 of Go.
539
540 * There is an optimization used in "git diff $treeA $treeB" to borrow
541 an already checked-out copy in the working tree when it is known to
542 be the same as the blob being compared, expecting that open/mmap of
543 such a file is faster than reading it from the object store, which
544 involves inflating and applying delta. This however kicked in even
545 when the checked-out copy needs to go through the convert-to-git
546 conversion (including the clean filter), which defeats the whole
547 point of the optimization. The optimization has been disabled when
548 the conversion is necessary.
549
550 * "git -c grep.patternType=extended log --basic-regexp" misbehaved
551 because the internal API to access the grep machinery was not
552 designed well.
553
554 * Windows port was failing some tests in t4130, due to the lack of
555 inum in the returned values by its lstat(2) emulation.
556
557 * The reflog output format is documented better, and a new format
558 --date=unix to report the seconds-since-epoch (without timezone)
559 has been added.
560 (merge 442f6fd jk/reflog-date later to maint).
561
562 * "git difftool <paths>..." started in a subdirectory failed to
563 interpret the paths relative to that directory, which has been
564 fixed.
565
566 * The characters in the label shown for tags/refs for commits in
567 "gitweb" output are now properly escaped for proper HTML output.
568
569 * FreeBSD can lie when asked mtime of a directory, which made the
570 untracked cache code to fall back to a slow-path, which in turn
571 caused tests in t7063 to fail because it wanted to verify the
572 behaviour of the fast-path.
573
574 * Squelch compiler warnings for nedmalloc (in compat/) library.
575
576 * A small memory leak in the command line parsing of "git blame"
577 has been plugged.
578
579 * The API documentation for hashmap was unclear if hashmap_entry
580 can be safely discarded without any other consideration. State
581 that it is safe to do so.
582
583 * Not-so-recent rewrite of "git am" that started making internal
584 calls into the commit machinery had an unintended regression, in
585 that no matter how many seconds it took to apply many patches, the
586 resulting committer timestamp for the resulting commits were all
587 the same.
588
589 * "git push --force-with-lease" already had enough logic to allow
590 ensuring that such a push results in creation of a ref (i.e. the
591 receiving end did not have another push from sideways that would be
592 discarded by our force-pushing), but didn't expose this possibility
593 to the users. It does so now.
594 (merge 9eed4f3 jk/push-force-with-lease-creation later to maint).
595
596 * The mechanism to limit the pack window memory size, when packing is
597 done using multiple threads (which is the default), is per-thread,
598 but this was not documented clearly.
599 (merge 954176c ms/document-pack-window-memory-is-per-thread later to maint).
600
601 * "import-tars" fast-import script (in contrib/) used to ignore a
602 hardlink target and replaced it with an empty file, which has been
603 corrected to record the same blob as the other file the hardlink is
604 shared with.
605 (merge 04e0869 js/import-tars-hardlinks later to maint).
606
607 * "git mv dir non-existing-dir/" did not work in some environments
608 the same way as existing mainstream platforms. The code now moves
609 "dir" to "non-existing-dir", without relying on rename("A", "B/")
610 that strips the trailing slash of '/'.
611 (merge 189d035 js/mv-dir-to-new-directory later to maint).
612
613 * The "t/" hierarchy is prone to get an unusual pathname; "make test"
614 has been taught to make sure they do not contain paths that cannot
615 be checked out on Windows (and the mechanism can be reusable to
616 catch pathnames that are not portable to other platforms as need
617 arises).
618 (merge c2cafd3 js/test-lint-pathname later to maint).
619
620 * When "git merge-recursive" works on history with many criss-cross
621 merges in "verbose" mode, the names the command assigns to the
622 virtual merge bases could have overwritten each other by unintended
623 reuse of the same piece of memory.
624 (merge 5447a76 rs/pull-signed-tag later to maint).
625
626 * "git checkout --detach <branch>" used to give the same advice
627 message as that is issued when "git checkout <tag>" (or anything
628 that is not a branch name) is given, but asking with "--detach" is
629 an explicit enough sign that the user knows what is going on. The
630 advice message has been squelched in this case.
631 (merge 779b88a sb/checkout-explit-detach-no-advice later to maint).
632
633 * "git difftool" by default ignores the error exit from the backend
634 commands it spawns, because often they signal that they found
635 differences by exiting with a non-zero status code just like "diff"
636 does; the exit status codes 126 and above however are special in
637 that they are used to signal that the command is not executable,
638 does not exist, or killed by a signal. "git difftool" has been
639 taught to notice these exit status codes.
640 (merge 45a4f5d jk/difftool-command-not-found later to maint).
641
642 * On Windows, help.browser configuration variable used to be ignored,
643 which has been corrected.
644 (merge 6db5967 js/no-html-bypass-on-windows later to maint).
645
646 * The "git -c var[=val] cmd" facility to append a configuration
647 variable definition at the end of the search order was described in
648 git(1) manual page, but not in git-config(1), which was more likely
649 place for people to look for when they ask "can I make a one-shot
650 override, and if so how?"
651 (merge ae1f709 dg/document-git-c-in-git-config-doc later to maint).
652
653 * The tempfile (hence its user lockfile) API lets the caller to open
654 a file descriptor to a temporary file, write into it and then
655 finalize it by first closing the filehandle and then either
656 removing or renaming the temporary file. When the process spawns a
657 subprocess after obtaining the file descriptor, and if the
658 subprocess has not exited when the attempt to remove or rename is
659 made, the last step fails on Windows, because the subprocess has
660 the file descriptor still open. Open tempfile with O_CLOEXEC flag
661 to avoid this (on Windows, this is mapped to O_NOINHERIT).
662 (merge 05d1ed6 bw/mingw-avoid-inheriting-fd-to-lockfile later to maint).
663
664 * Correct an age-old calco (is that a typo-like word for calc)
665 in the documentation.
666 (merge 7841c48 ls/packet-line-protocol-doc-fix later to maint).
667
668 * Other minor clean-ups and documentation updates
669 (merge 02a8cfa rs/merge-add-strategies-simplification later to maint).
670 (merge af4941d rs/merge-recursive-string-list-init later to maint).
671 (merge 1eb47f1 rs/use-strbuf-add-unique-abbrev later to maint).
672 (merge ddd0bfa jk/tighten-alloc later to maint).
673 (merge ecf30b2 rs/mailinfo-lib later to maint).
674 (merge 0eb75ce sg/reflog-past-root later to maint).
675 (merge 4369523 hv/doc-commit-reference-style later to maint).