Git 2.17:
UI, Workflows & Features
* "diff" family of commands learned "--find-object=<object-id>" option
to limit the findings to changes that involve the named object.
* "git format-patch" learned to give 72-cols to diffstat, which is
consistent with other line length limits the subcommand uses for
its output meant for e-mails.
* The log from "git daemon" can be redirected with a new option; one
relevant use case is to send the log to standard error (instead of
syslog) when running it from inetd.
* "git rebase" learned to take "--allow-empty-message" option.
* "git am" has learned the "--quit" option, in addition to the
existing "--abort" option; having the pair mirrors a few other
commands like "rebase" and "cherry-pick".
* "git worktree add" learned to run the post-checkout hook, just like
"git clone" runs it upon the initial checkout.
* "git tag" learned an explicit "--edit" option that allows the
message given via "-m" and "-F" to be further edited.
* "git fetch --prune-tags" may be used as a handy short-hand for
getting rid of stale tags that are locally held.
* The new "--show-current-patch" option gives an end-user facing way
to get the diff being applied when "git rebase" (and "git am")
stops with a conflict.
* "git add -p" used to offer "/" (look for a matching hunk) as a
choice, even there was only one hunk, which has been corrected.
Also the single-key help is now given only for keys that are
enabled (e.g. help for '/' won't be shown when there is only one
hunk).
* Since Git 1.7.9, "git merge" defaulted to --no-ff (i.e. even when
the side branch being merged is a descendant of the current commit,
create a merge commit instead of fast-forwarding) when merging a
tag object. This was appropriate default for integrators who pull
signed tags from their downstream contributors, but caused an
unnecessary merges when used by downstream contributors who
habitually "catch up" their topic branches with tagged releases
from the upstream. Update "git merge" to default to --no-ff only
when merging a tag object that does *not* sit at its usual place in
refs/tags/ hierarchy, and allow fast-forwarding otherwise, to
mitigate the problem.
* "git status" can spend a lot of cycles to compute the relation
between the current branch and its upstream, which can now be
disabled with "--no-ahead-behind" option.
* "git diff" and friends learned funcname patterns for Go language
source files.
* "git send-email" learned "--reply-to=<address>" option.
* Funcname pattern used for C# now recognizes "async" keyword.
* In a way similar to how "git tag" learned to honor the pager
setting only in the list mode, "git config" learned to ignore the
pager setting when it is used for setting values (i.e. when the
purpose of the operation is not to "show").
Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.
* More perf tests for threaded grep
* "perf" test output can be sent to codespeed server.
* The build procedure for perl/ part has been greatly simplified by
weaning ourselves off of MakeMaker.
* Perl 5.8 or greater has been required since Git 1.7.4 released in
2010, but we continued to assume some core modules may not exist and
used a conditional "eval { require <<module>> }"; we no longer do
this. Some platforms (Fedora/RedHat/CentOS, for example) ship Perl
without all core modules by default (e.g. Digest::MD5, File::Temp,
File::Spec, Net::Domain, Net::SMTP). Users on such platforms may
need to install these additional modules.
* As a convenience, we install copies of Perl modules we require which
are not part of the core Perl distribution (e.g. Error and
Mail::Address). Users and packagers whose operating system provides
these modules can set NO_PERL_CPAN_FALLBACKS to avoid installing the
bundled modules.
* In preparation for implementing narrow/partial clone, the machinery
for checking object connectivity used by gc and fsck has been
taught that a missing object is OK when it is referenced by a
packfile specially marked as coming from trusted repository that
promises to make them available on-demand and lazily.
* The machinery to clone & fetch, which in turn involves packing and
unpacking objects, has been told how to omit certain objects using
the filtering mechanism introduced by another topic. It now knows
to mark the resulting pack as a promisor pack to tolerate missing
objects, laying foundation for "narrow" clones.
* The first step to getting rid of mru API and using the
doubly-linked list API directly instead.
* Retire mru API as it does not give enough abstraction over
underlying list API to be worth it.
* Rewrite two more "git submodule" subcommands in C.
* The tracing machinery learned to report tweaking of environment
variables as well.
* Update Coccinelle rules to catch and optimize strbuf_addf(&buf, "%s", str)
* Prevent "clang-format" from breaking line after function return type.
* The sequencer infrastructure is shared across "git cherry-pick",
"git rebase -i", etc., and has always spawned "git commit" when it
needs to create a commit. It has been taught to do so internally,
when able, by reusing the codepath "git commit" itself uses, which
gives performance boost for a few tens of percents in some sample
scenarios.
* Push the submodule version of collision-detecting SHA-1 hash
implementation a bit harder on builders.
* Avoid mmapping small files while using packed refs (especially ones
with zero size, which would cause later munmap() to fail).
* Conversion from uchar[20] to struct object_id continues.
* More tests for wildmatch functions.
* The code to binary search starting from a fan-out table (which is
how the packfile is indexed with object names) has been refactored
into a reusable helper.
* We now avoid using identifiers that clash with C++ keywords. Even
though it is not a goal to compile Git with C++ compilers, changes
like this help use of code analysis tools that targets C++ on our
codebase.
* The executable is now built in 'script' phase in Travis CI integration,
to follow the established practice, rather than during 'before_script'
phase. This allows the CI categorize the failures better ('failed'
is project's fault, 'errored' is build environment's).
* Writing out the index file when the only thing that changed in it
is the untracked cache information is often wasteful, and this has
been optimized out.
* Various pieces of Perl code we have have been cleaned up.
* Internal API clean-up to allow write_locked_index() optionally skip
writing the in-core index when it is not modified.
======================
Backward compatibility notes.
* Use of an empty string that is used for 'everything matches' is
still warned and Git asks users to use a more explicit '.' for that
instead. The hope is that existing users will not mind this
change, and eventually the warning can be turned into a hard error,
upgrading the deprecation into removal of this (mis)feature. That
is not scheduled to happen in the upcoming release (yet).
* The historical argument order "git merge <msg> HEAD <commit>..."
has been deprecated for quite some time, and will be removed in a
future release.
* An ancient script "git relink" has been removed.
Updates since v2.11
-------------------
UI, Workflows & Features
* Various updates to "git p4".
* "git p4" didn't interact with the internal of .git directory
correctly in the modern "git-worktree"-enabled world.
* "git branch --list" and friends learned "--ignore-case" option to
optionally sort branches and tags case insensitively.
* In addition to %(subject), %(body), "log --pretty=format:..."
learned a new placeholder %(trailers).
* "git rebase" learned "--quit" option, which allows a user to
remove the metadata left by an earlier "git rebase" that was
manually aborted without using "git rebase --abort".
* "git clone --reference $there --recurse-submodules $super" has been
taught to guess repositories usable as references for submodules of
$super that are embedded in $there while making a clone of the
superproject borrow objects from $there; extend the mechanism to
also allow submodules of these submodules to borrow repositories
embedded in these clones of the submodules embedded in the clone of
the superproject.
* Porcelain scripts written in Perl are getting internationalized.
* "git merge --continue" has been added as a synonym to "git commit"
to conclude a merge that has stopped due to conflicts.
* Finer-grained control of what protocols are allowed for transports
during clone/fetch/push have been enabled via a new configuration
mechanism.
* "git shortlog" learned "--committer" option to group commits by
committer, instead of author.
* GitLFS integration with "git p4" has been updated.
* The isatty() emulation for Windows has been updated to eradicate
the previous hack that depended on internals of (older) MSVC
runtime.
* Some platforms no longer understand "latin-1" that is still seen in
the wild in e-mail headers; replace them with "iso-8859-1" that is
more widely known when conversion fails from/to it.
* "git grep" has been taught to optionally recurse into submodules.
* "git rm" used to refuse to remove a submodule when it has its own
git repository embedded in its working tree. It learned to move
the repository away to $GIT_DIR/modules/ of the superproject
instead, and allow the submodule to be deleted (as long as there
will be no loss of local modifications, that is).
* A recent updates to "git p4" was not usable for older p4 but it
could be made to work with minimum changes. Do so.
* "git diff" learned diff.interHunkContext configuration variable
that gives the default value for its --inter-hunk-context option.
* The prereleaseSuffix feature of version comparison that is used in
"git tag -l" did not correctly when two or more prereleases for the
same release were present (e.g. when 2.0, 2.0-beta1, and 2.0-beta2
are there and the code needs to compare 2.0-beta1 and 2.0-beta2).
* "git submodule push" learned "--recurse-submodules=only option to
push submodules out without pushing the top-level superproject.
* "git tag" and "git verify-tag" learned to put GPG verification
status in their "--format=<placeholders>" output format.
* An ancient repository conversion tool left in contrib/ has been
removed.
* "git show-ref HEAD" used with "--verify" because the user is not
interested in seeing refs/remotes/origin/HEAD, and used with
"--head" because the user does not want HEAD to be filtered out,
i.e. "git show-ref --head --verify HEAD", did not work as expected.
* "git submodule add" used to be confused and refused to add a
locally created repository; users can now use "--force" option
to add them.
(merge 619acfc78c sb/submodule-add-force later to maint).
* Some people feel the default set of colors used by "git log --graph"
rather limiting. A mechanism to customize the set of colors has
been introduced.
* "git read-tree" and its underlying unpack_trees() machinery learned
to report problematic paths prefixed with the --super-prefix option.
* When a submodule "A", which has another submodule "B" nested within
it, is "absorbed" into the top-level superproject, the inner
submodule "B" used to be left in a strange state. The logic to
adjust the .git pointers in these submodules has been corrected.
* The user can specify a custom update method that is run when
"submodule update" updates an already checked out submodule. This
was ignored when checking the submodule out for the first time and
we instead always just checked out the commit that is bound to the
path in the superproject's index.
* The command line completion (in contrib/) learned that
"git diff --submodule=" can take "diff" as a recently added option.
* The "core.logAllRefUpdates" that used to be boolean has been
enhanced to take 'always' as well, to record ref updates to refs
other than the ones that are expected to be updated (i.e. branches,
remote-tracking branches and notes).
* Comes with more command line completion (in contrib/) for recently
introduced options.
======================
Backward compatibility notes.
* An empty string used as a pathspec element has always meant
'everything matches', but it is too easy to write a script that
finds a path to remove in $path and run 'git rm "$paht"' by
mistake (when the user meant to give "$path"), which ends up
removing everything. This release starts warning about the
use of an empty string that is used for 'everything matches' and
asks users to use a more explicit '.' for that instead.
The hope is that existing users will not mind this change, and
eventually the warning can be turned into a hard error, upgrading
the deprecation into removal of this (mis)feature.
* The historical argument order "git merge <msg> HEAD <commit>..."
has been deprecated for quite some time, and will be removed in the
next release (not this one).
* The default abbreviation length, which has historically been 7, now
scales as the repository grows, using the approximate number of
objects in the repository and a bit of math around the birthday
paradox. The logic suggests to use 12 hexdigits for the Linux
kernel, and 9 to 10 for Git itself.
Updates since v2.10
-------------------
UI, Workflows & Features
* Comes with new version of git-gui, now at its 0.21.0 tag.
* "git format-patch --cover-letter HEAD^" to format a single patch
with a separate cover letter now numbers the output as [PATCH 0/1]
and [PATCH 1/1] by default.
* An incoming "git push" that attempts to push too many bytes can now
be rejected by setting a new configuration variable at the receiving
end.
* "git nosuchcommand --help" said "No manual entry for gitnosuchcommand",
which was not intuitive, given that "git nosuchcommand" said "git:
'nosuchcommand' is not a git command".
* "git clone --recurse-submodules --reference $path $URL" is a way to
reduce network transfer cost by borrowing objects in an existing
$path repository when cloning the superproject from $URL; it
learned to also peek into $path for presence of corresponding
repositories of submodules and borrow objects from there when able.
* The "git diff --submodule={short,log}" mechanism has been enhanced
to allow "--submodule=diff" to show the patch between the submodule
commits bound to the superproject.
* Even though "git hash-objects", which is a tool to take an
on-filesystem data stream and put it into the Git object store,
can perform "outside-world-to-Git" conversions (e.g.
end-of-line conversions and application of the clean-filter), and
it has had this feature on by default from very early days, its reverse
operation "git cat-file", which takes an object from the Git object
store and externalizes it for consumption by the outside world,
lacked an equivalent mechanism to run the "Git-to-outside-world"
conversion. The command learned the "--filters" option to do so.
* Output from "git diff" can be made easier to read by intelligently selecting
which lines are common and which lines are added/deleted
when the lines before and after the changed section
are the same. A command line option (--indent-heuristic) and a
configuration variable (diff.indentHeuristic) are added to help with the
experiment to find good heuristics.
* In some projects, it is common to use "[RFC PATCH]" as the subject
prefix for a patch meant for discussion rather than application. A
new format-patch option "--rfc" is a short-hand for "--subject-prefix=RFC PATCH"
to help the participants of such projects.
* "git add --chmod={+,-}x <pathspec>" only changed the
executable bit for paths that are either new or modified. This has
been corrected to change the executable bit for all paths that match
the given pathspec.
* When "git format-patch --stdout" output is placed as an in-body
header and it uses RFC2822 header folding, "git am" fails to
put the header line back into a single logical line. The
underlying "git mailinfo" was taught to handle this properly.
* "gitweb" can spawn "highlight" to show blob contents with
(programming) language-specific syntax highlighting, but only
when the language is known. "highlight" can however be told
to guess the language itself by giving it "--force" option, which
has been enabled.
* "git gui" l10n to Portuguese.
* When given an abbreviated object name that is not (or more
realistically, "no longer") unique, we gave a fatal error
"ambiguous argument". This error is now accompanied by a hint that
lists the objects beginning with the given prefix. During the
course of development of this new feature, numerous minor bugs were
uncovered and corrected, the most notable one of which is that we
gave "short SHA1 xxxx is ambiguous." twice without good reason.
* "git log rev^..rev" is an often-used revision range specification
to show what was done on a side branch merged at rev. This has
gained a short-hand "rev^-1". In general "rev^-$n" is the same as
"^rev^$n rev", i.e. what has happened on other branches while the
history leading to nth parent was looking the other way.
* In recent versions of cURL, GSSAPI credential delegation is
disabled by default due to CVE-2011-2192; introduce a http.delegation
configuration variable to selectively allow enabling this.
(merge 26a7b23429 ps/http-gssapi-cred-delegation later to maint).
* "git mergetool" learned to honor "-O<orderfile>" to control the
order of paths to present to the end user.
* "git diff/log --ws-error-highlight=<kind>" lacked the corresponding
configuration variable (diff.wsErrorHighlight) to set it by default.
* "git ls-files" learned the "--recurse-submodules" option
to get a listing of tracked files across submodules (i.e. this
only works with the "--cached" option, not for listing untracked or
ignored files). This would be a useful tool to sit on the upstream
side of a pipe that is read with xargs to work on all working tree
files from the top-level superproject.
* A new credential helper that talks via "libsecret" with
implementations of XDG Secret Service API has been added to
contrib/credential/.
* The GPG verification status shown by the "%G?" pretty format specifier
was not rich enough to differentiate a signature made by an expired
key, a signature made by a revoked key, etc. New output letters
have been assigned to express them.
* In addition to purely abbreviated commit object names, "gitweb"
learned to turn "git describe" output (e.g. v2.9.3-599-g2376d31787)
into clickable links in its output.
* "git commit" created an empty commit when invoked with an index
consisting solely of intend-to-add paths (added with "git add -N").
It now requires the "--allow-empty" option to create such a commit.
The same logic prevented "git status" from showing such paths as "new files" in the
"Changes not staged for commit" section.
* The smudge/clean filter API spawns an external process
to filter the contents of each path that has a filter defined. A
new type of "process" filter API has been added to allow the first
request to run the filter for a path to spawn a single process, and
all filtering is served by this single process for multiple
paths, reducing the process creation overhead.
* The user always has to say "stash@{$N}" when naming a single
element in the default location of the stash, i.e. reflogs in
refs/stash. The "git stash" command learned to accept "git stash
apply 4" as a short-hand for "git stash apply stash@{4}".
Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.
* The delta-base-cache mechanism has been a key to the performance in
a repository with a tightly packed packfile, but it did not scale
well even with a larger value of core.deltaBaseCacheLimit.
* Enhance "git status --porcelain" output by collecting more data on
the state of the index and the working tree files, which may
further be used to teach git-prompt (in contrib/) to make fewer
calls to git.
* Extract a small helper out of the function that reads the authors
script file "git am" internally uses.
(merge a77598e jc/am-read-author-file later to maint).
* Lift calls to exit(2) and die() higher in the callchain in
sequencer.c files so that more helper functions in it can be used
by callers that want to handle error conditions themselves.
* "git am" has been taught to make an internal call to "git apply"'s
innards without spawning the latter as a separate process.
* The ref-store abstraction was introduced to the refs API so that we
can plug in different backends to store references.
* The "unsigned char sha1[20]" to "struct object_id" conversion
continues. Notable changes in this round includes that ce->sha1,
i.e. the object name recorded in the cache_entry, turns into an
object_id.
* JGit can show a fake ref "capabilities^{}" to "git fetch" when it
does not advertise any refs, but "git fetch" was not prepared to
see such an advertisement. When the other side disconnects without
giving any ref advertisement, we used to say "there may not be a
repository at that URL", but we may have seen other advertisements
like "shallow" and ".have" in which case we definitely know that a
repository is there. The code to detect this case has also been
updated.
* Some codepaths in "git pack-objects" were not ready to use an
existing pack bitmap; now they are and as a result they have
become faster.
* The codepath in "git fsck" to detect malformed tree objects has
been updated not to die but keep going after detecting them.
* We call "qsort(array, nelem, sizeof(array[0]), fn)", and most of
the time third parameter is redundant. A new QSORT() macro lets us
omit it.
* "git pack-objects" in a repository with many packfiles used to
spend a lot of time looking for/at objects in them; the accesses to
the packfiles are now optimized by checking the most-recently-used
packfile first.
(merge c9af708b1a jk/pack-objects-optim-mru later to maint).
* Codepaths involved in interacting alternate object stores have
been cleaned up.
* In order for the receiving end of "git push" to inspect the
received history and decide to reject the push, the objects sent
from the sending end need to be made available to the hook and
the mechanism for the connectivity check, and this was done
traditionally by storing the objects in the receiving repository
and letting "git gc" expire them. Instead, store the newly
received objects in a temporary area, and make them available by
reusing the alternate object store mechanism to them only while we
decide if we accept the check, and once we decide, either migrate
them to the repository or purge them immediately.
* The require_clean_work_tree() helper was recreated in C when "git
pull" was rewritten from shell; the helper is now made available to
other callers in preparation for upcoming "rebase -i" work.
* "git upload-pack" had its code cleaned-up and performance improved
by reducing use of timestamp-ordered commit-list, which was
replaced with a priority queue.
* "git diff --no-index" codepath has been updated not to try to peek
into a .git/ directory that happens to be under the current
directory, when we know we are operating outside any repository.
* Update of the sequencer codebase to make it reusable to reimplement
"rebase -i" continues.
* Git generally does not explicitly close file descriptors that were
open in the parent process when spawning a child process, but most
of the time the child does not want to access them. As Windows does
not allow removing or renaming a file that has a file descriptor
open, a slow-to-exit child can even break the parent process by
holding onto them. Use O_CLOEXEC flag to open files in various
codepaths.
* Update "interpret-trailers" machinery and teach it that people in
the real world write all sorts of cruft in the "trailer" that was
originally designed to have the neat-o "Mail-Header: like thing"
and nothing else.
* The usual "git diff" when seeing a file turning into a directory
showed a patchset to remove the file and create all files in the
directory, but "git diff --no-index" simply refused to work. Also,
when asked to compare a file and a directory, imitate POSIX "diff"
and compare the file with the file with the same name in the
directory, instead of refusing to run.
* The default $HOME/.gitconfig file created upon "git config --global"
that edits it had incorrectly spelled user.name and user.email
entries in it.
* "git commit --date=now" or anything that relies on approxidate lost
the daylight-saving-time offset.
* "git cat-file bl $blob" failed to barf even though there is no
object type that is "bl".
* Teach the codepaths that read .gitignore and .gitattributes files
that these files encoded in UTF-8 may have UTF-8 BOM marker at the
beginning; this makes it in line with what we do for configuration
files already.
* Access to objects in repositories that borrow from another one on a
slow NFS server unnecessarily got more expensive due to recent code
becoming more cautious in a naive way not to lose objects to pruning.
* We avoid setting core.worktree when the repository location is the
".git" directory directly at the top level of the working tree, but
the code misdetected the case in which the working tree is at the
root level of the filesystem (which arguably is a silly thing to
do, but still valid).
Also contains typofixes, documentation updates and trivial code
clean-ups.
Backward compatibility notes
----------------------------
* The default value we give to the environment variable LESS has been
changed from "FRSX" to "FRX", losing "S" (chop long lines instead
of wrapping). Existing users who prefer not to see line-wrapped
output may want to set
$ git config core.pager "less -S"
to restore the traditional behaviour. It is expected that people
find output from most subcommands easier to read with the new
default, except for "blame" which tends to produce really long
lines. To override the new default only for "git blame", you can
do this:
$ git config pager.blame "less -S"
* A few disused directories in contrib/ have been retired.
Updates since v2.0
------------------
UI, Workflows & Features
* Since the very beginning of Git, we gave the LESS environment a
default value "FRSX" when we spawn "less" as the pager. "S" (chop
long lines instead of wrapping) has been removed from this default
set of options, because it is more or less a personal taste thing,
as opposed to the others that have good justifications (i.e. "R" is
very much justified because many kinds of output we produce are
colored and "FX" is justified because output we produce is often
shorter than a page).
* The logic and data used to compute the display width needed for
UTF-8 strings have been updated to match Unicode 7.0 better.
* HTTP-based transports learned to better propagate the error messages from
the webserver to the client coming over the HTTP transport.
* The completion script for bash (in contrib/) has been updated to
better handle aliases that define a complex sequence of commands.
* The "core.preloadindex" configuration variable is enabled by default,
allowing modern platforms to take advantage of their
multiple cores.
* "git clone" applies the "if cloning from a local disk, physically
copy the repository using hardlinks, unless otherwise told not to with
--no-local" optimization when the url.*.insteadOf mechanism rewrites a
remote-repository "git clone $URL" into a
clone from a local disk.
* "git commit --date=<date>" option learned more
timestamp formats, including "--date=now".
* The `core.commentChar` configuration variable is used to specify a
custom comment character (other than the default "#") for
the commit message editor. This can be set to `auto` to attempt to
choose a different character that does not conflict with any that
already starts a line in the message being edited, for cases like
"git commit --amend".
* "git format-patch" learned --signature-file=<file> to add the contents
of a file as a signature to the mail message it produces.
* "git grep" learned the grep.fullname configuration variable to force
"--full-name" to be the default. This may cause regressions for
scripted users who do not expect this new behaviour.
* "git imap-send" learned to ask the credential helper for auth
material.
* "git log" and friends now understand the value "auto" for the
"log.decorate" configuration variable to enable the "--decorate"
option automatically when the output is sent to tty.
* "git merge" without an argument, even when there is an upstream
defined for the current branch, refused to run until
merge.defaultToUpstream is set to true. Flip the default of that
configuration variable to true.
* "git mergetool" learned to drive the vimdiff3 backend.
* mergetool.prompt used to default to 'true', always asking "do you
really want to run the tool on this path?". The default has been
changed to 'false'. However, the prompt will still appear if
mergetool used its autodetection system to guess which tool to use.
Users who explicitly specify or configure a tool will no longer see
the prompt by default.
Strictly speaking, this is a backward incompatible change and
users need to explicitly set the variable to 'true' if they want
to be prompted to confirm running the tool on each path.
* "git replace" learned the "--edit" subcommand to create a
replacement by editing an existing object.
* "git replace" learned a "--graft" option to rewrite the parents of a
commit.
* "git send-email" learned "--to-cover" and "--cc-cover" options, to
tell it to copy To: and Cc: headers found in the first input file
when emitting later input files.
* "git svn" learned to cope with malformed timestamps with only one
digit in the hour part, e.g. 2014-01-07T5:01:02.048176Z, emitted
by some broken subversion server implementations.
* "git tag" when editing the tag message shows the name of the tag
being edited as a comment in the editor.
* "git tag" learned to pay attention to "tag.sort" configuration, to
be used as the default sort order when no --sort=<value> option
is given.
* A new "git verify-commit" command, to check GPG signatures in signed
commits, in a way similar to "git verify-tag" is used to check
signed tags, was added.
Foreign interfaces, subsystems and ports.
* The HTTP transport, when talking GSS-Negotiate, uses "100
Continue" response to avoid having to rewind and resend a large
payload, which may not be always doable.
* Various bugfixes to remote-bzr and remote-hg (in contrib/).
* The build procedure is aware of MirBSD now.
* Various "git p4", "git svn" and "gitk" updates.
UI, Workflows & Features
* Fetching from a shallowly-cloned repository used to be forbidden,
primarily because the codepaths involved were not carefully vetted
and we did not bother supporting such usage. This release attempts
to allow object transfer out of a shallowly-cloned repository in a
more controlled way (i.e. the receiver becomes a shallow repository
with a truncated history).
* Just like we give a reasonable default for "less" via the LESS
environment variable, we now specify a reasonable default for "lv"
via the "LV" environment variable when spawning the pager.
* Two-level configuration variable names in "branch.*" and "remote.*"
hierarchies, whose variables are predominantly three-level, were
not completed by hitting a <TAB> in bash and zsh completions.
* Fetching a 'frotz' branch with "git fetch", while a 'frotz/nitfol'
remote-tracking branch from an earlier fetch was still there, would
error out, primarily because the command was not told that it is
allowed to lose any information on our side. "git fetch --prune"
now can be used to remove 'frotz/nitfol' to make room for fetching and
storing the 'frotz' remote-tracking branch.
* "diff.orderfile=<file>" configuration variable can be used to
pretend as if the "-O<file>" option were given from the command
line of "git diff", etc.
* The negative pathspec syntax allows "git log -- . ':!dir'" to tell
us "I am interested in everything but 'dir' directory".
* "git difftool" shows how many different paths there are in total,
and how many of them have been shown so far, to indicate progress.
* "git push origin master" used to push our 'master' branch to update
the 'master' branch at the 'origin' repository. This has been
enhanced to use the same ref mapping "git push origin" would use to
determine what ref at the 'origin' to be updated with our 'master'.
For example, with this configuration
[remote "origin"]
push = refs/heads/*:refs/review/*
that would cause "git push origin" to push out our local branches
to corresponding refs under refs/review/ hierarchy at 'origin',
"git push origin master" would update 'refs/review/master' over
there. Alternatively, if push.default is set to 'upstream' and our
'master' is set to integrate with 'topic' from the 'origin' branch,
running "git push origin" while on our 'master' would update their
'topic' branch, and running "git push origin master" while on any
of our branches does the same.
* "gitweb" learned to treat ref hierarchies other than refs/heads as
if they are additional branch namespaces (e.g. refs/changes/ in
Gerrit).
* "git for-each-ref --format=..." learned a few formatting directives;
e.g. "%(color:red)%(HEAD)%(color:reset) %(refname:short) %(subject)".
* The command string given to "git submodule foreach" is passed
directly to the shell, without being eval'ed. This is a backward
incompatible change that may break existing users.
* "git log" and friends learned the "--exclude=<glob>" option, to
allow people to say "list history of all branches except those that
match this pattern" with "git log --exclude='*/*' --branches".
* "git rev-parse --parseopt" learned a new "--stuck-long" option to
help scripts parse options with an optional parameter.
* The "--tags" option to "git fetch" no longer tells the command to
fetch _only_ the tags. It instead fetches tags _in addition to_
what are fetched by the same command line without the option.
adam
wiz
obache