UI, Workflows & Features
* "git pull --rebase --verify-signature" learned to warn the user
that "--verify-signature" is a no-op when rebasing.
* An upstream project can make a recommendation to shallowly clone
some submodules in the .gitmodules file it ships.
* "git worktree add" learned that '-' can be used as a short-hand for
"@{-1}", the previous branch.
* Update the funcname definition to support css files.
* The completion script (in contrib/) learned to complete "git
status" options.
* Messages that are generated by auto gc during "git push" on the
receiving end are now passed back to the sending end in such a way
that they are shown with "remote: " prefix to avoid confusing the
users.
* "git add -i/-p" learned to honor diff.compactionHeuristic
experimental knob, so that the user can work on the same hunk split
as "git diff" output.
* "upload-pack" allows a custom "git pack-objects" replacement when
responding to "fetch/clone" via the uploadpack.packObjectsHook.
(merge b738396 jk/upload-pack-hook later to maint).
* Teach format-patch and mailsplit (hence "am") how a line that
happens to begin with "From " in the e-mail message is quoted with
">", so that these lines can be restored to their original shape.
(merge d9925d1 ew/mboxrd-format-am later to maint).
* "git repack" learned the "--keep-unreachable" option, which sends
loose unreachable objects to a pack instead of leaving them loose.
This helps heuristics based on the number of loose objects
(e.g. "gc --auto").
(merge e26a8c4 jk/repack-keep-unreachable later to maint).
* "log --graph --format=" learned that "%>|(N)" specifies the width
relative to the terminal's left edge, not relative to the area to
draw text that is to the right of the ancestry-graph section. It
also now accepts negative N that means the column limit is relative
to the right border.
* A careless invocation of "git send-email directory/" after editing
0001-change.patch with an editor often ends up sending both
0001-change.patch and its backup file, 0001-change.patch~, causing
embarrassment and a minor confusion. Detect such an input and
offer to skip the backup files when sending the patches out.
(merge 531220b jc/send-email-skip-backup later to maint).
* "git submodule update" that drives many "git clone" could
eventually hit flaky servers/network conditions on one of the
submodules; the command learned to retry the attempt.
* The output coloring scheme learned two new attributes, italic and
strike, in addition to existing bold, reverse, etc.
* "git log" learns log.showSignature configuration variable, and a
command line option "--no-show-signature" to countermand it.
(merge fce04c3 mj/log-show-signature-conf later to maint).
* More markings of messages for i18n, with updates to various tests
to pass GETTEXT_POISON tests.
* "git archive" learned to handle files that are larger than 8GB and
commits far in the future than expressible by the traditional US-TAR
format.
(merge 560b0e8 jk/big-and-future-archive-tar later to maint).
* A new configuration variable core.sshCommand has been added to
specify what value for GIT_SSH_COMMAND to use per repository.
* "git worktree prune" protected worktrees that are marked as
"locked" by creating a file in a known location. "git worktree"
command learned a dedicated command pair to create and remove such
a file, so that the users do not have to do this with editor.
* A handful of "git svn" updates.
* "git push" learned to accept and pass extra options to the
receiving end so that hooks can read and react to them.
* "git status" learned to suggest "merge --abort" during a conflicted
merge, just like it already suggests "rebase --abort" during a
conflicted rebase.
* "git jump" script (in contrib/) has been updated a bit.
(merge a91e692 jk/git-jump later to maint).
* "git push" and "git clone" learned to give better progress meters
to the end user who is waiting on the terminal.
* An entry "git log --decorate" for the tip of the current branch is
shown as "HEAD -> name" (where "name" is the name of the branch);
the arrow is now painted in the same color as "HEAD", not in the
color for commits.
* "git format-patch" learned format.from configuration variable to
specify the default settings for its "--from" option.
* "git am -3" calls "git merge-recursive" when it needs to fall back
to a three-way merge; this call has been turned into an internal
subroutine call instead of spawning a separate subprocess.
* The command line completion scripts (in contrib/) now knows about
"git branch --delete/--move [--remote]".
(merge 2703c22 vs/completion-branch-fully-spelled-d-m-r later to maint).
* "git rev-parse --git-path hooks/<hook>" learned to take
core.hooksPath configuration variable (introduced during 2.9 cycle)
into account.
(merge 9445b49 ab/hooks later to maint).
* "git log --show-signature" and other commands that display the
verification status of PGP signature now shows the longer key-id,
as 32-bit key-id is so last century.
=====================
Backward compatibility notes
----------------------------
The end-user facing Porcelain level commands in the "git diff" and
"git log" family by default enable the rename detection; you can still
use "diff.renames" configuration variable to disable this.
Merging two branches that have no common ancestor with "git merge" is
by default forbidden now to prevent creating such an unusual merge by
mistake.
The output formats of "git log" that indents the commit log message by
4 spaces now expands HT in the log message by default. You can use
the "--no-expand-tabs" option to disable this.
"git commit-tree" plumbing command required the user to always sign
its result when the user sets the commit.gpgsign configuration
variable, which was an ancient mistake, which this release corrects.
A script that drives commit-tree, if it relies on this mistake, now
needs to read commit.gpgsign and pass the -S option as necessary.
Updates since v2.8
------------------
UI, Workflows & Features
* Comes with git-multimail 1.3.1 (in contrib/).
* The end-user facing commands like "git diff" and "git log"
now enable the rename detection by default.
* The credential.helper configuration variable is cumulative and
there is no good way to override it from the command line. As
a special case, giving an empty string as its value now serves
as the signal to clear the values specified in various files.
* A new "interactive.diffFilter" configuration can be used to
customize the diff shown in "git add -i" sessions.
* "git p4" now allows P4 author names to be mapped to Git author
names.
* "git rebase -x" can be used without passing "-i" option.
* "git -c credential.<var>=<value> submodule" can now be used to
propagate configuration variables related to credential helper
down to the submodules.
* "git tag" can create an annotated tag without explicitly given an
"-a" (or "-s") option (i.e. when a tag message is given). A new
configuration variable, tag.forceSignAnnotated, can be used to tell
the command to create signed tag in such a situation.
* "git merge" used to allow merging two branches that have no common
base by default, which led to a brand new history of an existing
project created and then get pulled by an unsuspecting maintainer,
which allowed an unnecessary parallel history merged into the
existing project. The command has been taught not to allow this by
default, with an escape hatch "--allow-unrelated-histories" option
to be used in a rare event that merges histories of two projects
that started their lives independently.
* "git pull" has been taught to pass the "--allow-unrelated-histories"
option to underlying "git merge".
* "git apply -v" learned to report paths in the patch that were
skipped via --include/--exclude mechanism or being outside the
current working directory.
* Shell completion (in contrib/) updates.
* The commit object name reported when "rebase -i" stops has been
shortened.
* "git worktree add" can be given "--no-checkout" option to only
create an empty worktree without checking out the files.
* "git mergetools" learned to drive ExamDiff.
* "git pull --rebase" learned "--[no-]autostash" option, so that
the rebase.autostash configuration variable set to true can be
overridden from the command line.
* When "git log" shows the log message indented by 4-spaces, the
remainder of a line after a HT does not align in the way the author
originally intended. The command now expands tabs by default to help
such a case, and allows the users to override it with a new option,
"--no-expand-tabs".
* "git send-email" now uses a more readable timestamps when
formulating a message ID.
* "git rerere" can encounter two or more files with the same conflict
signature that have to be resolved in different ways, but there was
no way to record these separate resolutions.
* "git p4" learned to record P4 jobs in Git commit that imports from
the history in Perforce.
* "git describe --contains" often made a hard-to-justify choice of
tag to name a given commit, because it tried to come up
with a name with smallest number of hops from a tag, causing an old
commit whose close descendant that is recently tagged were not
described with respect to an old tag but with a newer tag. It did
not help that its computation of "hop" count was further tweaked to
penalize being on a side branch of a merge. The logic has been
updated to favor using the tag with the oldest tagger date, which
is a lot easier to explain to the end users: "We describe a commit
in terms of the (chronologically) oldest tag that contains the
commit."
* "git clone" learned the "--shallow-submodules" option.
* HTTP transport clients learned to throw extra HTTP headers at the
server, specified via http.extraHeader configuration variable.
* The "--compaction-heuristic" option to "git diff" family of
commands enables a heuristic to make the patch output more readable
by using a blank line as a strong hint that the contents before and
after it belong to logically separate units. It is still
experimental.
* A new configuration variable core.hooksPath allows customizing
where the hook directory is.
* An earlier addition of "sanitize_submodule_env" with 14111fc4 (git:
submodule honor -c credential.* from command line, 2016-02-29)
turned out to be a convoluted no-op; implement what it wanted to do
correctly, and stop filtering settings given via "git -c var=val".
* "git commit --dry-run" reported "No, no, you cannot commit." in one
case where "git commit" would have allowed you to commit, and this
improves it a little bit ("git commit --dry-run --short" still does
not give you the correct answer, for example). This is a stop-gap
measure in that "commit --short --dry-run" still gives an incorrect
result.
* The experimental "multiple worktree" feature gains more safety to
forbid operations on a branch that is checked out or being actively
worked on elsewhere, by noticing that e.g. it is being rebased.
* "git format-patch" learned a new "--base" option to record what
(public, well-known) commit the original series was built on in
its output.
* "git commit" learned to pay attention to the "commit.verbose"
configuration variable and act as if the "--verbose" option
was given from the command line.
* Updated documentation gives hints to GMail users with two-factor
auth enabled that they need app-specific-password when using
"git send-email".
* The manpage output of our documentation did not render well in
terminal; typeset literals in bold by default to make them stand
out more.
* The mark-up in the top-level README.md file has been updated to
typeset CLI command names differently from the body text.
Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.
* The embedded args argv-array in the child process is used to build
the command line to run pack-objects instead of using a separate
array of strings.
* A test for tags has been restructured so that more parts of it can
easily be run on a platform without a working GnuPG.
* The startup_info data, which records if we are working inside a
repository (among other things), are now uniformly available to Git
subcommand implementations, and Git avoids attempting to touch
references when we are not in a repository.
* The command line argument parser for "receive-pack" has been
rewritten to use parse-options.
* A major part of "git submodule update" has been ported to C to take
advantage of the recently added framework to run download tasks in
parallel. Other updates to "git submodule" that move pieces of
logic to C continues.
* Rename bunch of tests on "git clone" for better organization.
* The tests that involve running httpd leaked the system-wide
configuration in /etc/gitconfig to the tested environment.
* Build updates for MSVC.
* The repository set-up sequence has been streamlined (the biggest
change is that there is no longer git_config_early()), so that we
do not attempt to look into refs/* when we know we do not have a
Git repository.
* Code restructuring around the "refs" API to prepare for pluggable
refs backends.
* Sources to many test helper binaries and the generated helpers
have been moved to t/helper/ subdirectory to reduce clutter at the
top level of the tree.
* Unify internal logic between "git tag -v" and "git verify-tag"
commands by making one directly call into the other.
* "merge-recursive" strategy incorrectly checked if a path that is
involved in its internal merge exists in the working tree.
* The test scripts for "git p4" (but not "git p4" implementation
itself) has been updated so that they would work even on a system
where the installed version of Python is python 3.
* As nobody maintains our in-tree git.spec.in and distros use their
own spec file, we stopped pretending that we support "make rpm".
* Move from "unsigned char[20]" to "struct object_id" continues.
* The code for warning_errno/die_errno has been refactored and a new
error_errno() reporting helper is introduced.
(merge 1da045f nd/error-errno later to maint).
* Running tests with '-x' option to trace the individual command
executions is a useful way to debug test scripts, but some tests
that capture the standard error stream and check what the command
said can be broken with the trace output mixed in. When running
our tests under "bash", however, we can redirect the trace output
to another file descriptor to keep the standard error of programs
being tested intact.
* t0040 had too many unnecessary repetitions in its test data. Teach
test-parse-options program so that a caller can tell what it
expects in its output, so that these repetitions can be cleaned up.
* Add perf test for "rebase -i".
* Common mistakes when writing gitlink: in our documentation are
found by "make check-docs".
* t9xxx series has been updated primarily for readability, while
fixing small bugs in it. A few scripted Porcelain commands have
also been updated to fix possible bugs around their use of
"test -z" and "test -n".
* CI test was taught to run git-svn tests.
* "git cat-file --batch-all" has been sped up, by taking advantage
of the fact that it does not have to read a list of objects, in two
ways.
* test updates to make it more readable and maintainable.
(merge e6273f4 es/t1500-modernize later to maint).
* "make DEVELOPER=1" worked as expected; setting DEVELOPER=1 in
config.mak didn't.
(merge 51dd3e8 mm/makefile-developer-can-be-in-config-mak later to maint).
* The way how "submodule--helper list" signals unmatch error to its
callers has been updated.
* A bash-ism "local" has been removed from "git submodule" scripted
Porcelain.
Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
========================
Fixes since v2.7
----------------
* An earlier change in 2.5.x-era broke users' hooks and aliases by
exporting GIT_WORK_TREE to point at the root of the working tree,
interfering when they tried to use a different working tree without
setting GIT_WORK_TREE environment themselves.
* The "exclude_list" structure has the usual "alloc, nr" pair of
fields to be used by ALLOC_GROW(), but clear_exclude_list() forgot
to reset 'alloc' to 0 when it cleared 'nr' to discard the managed
array.
* "git send-email" was confused by escaped quotes stored in the alias
files saved by "mutt", which has been corrected.
* A few unportable C construct have been spotted by clang compiler
and have been fixed.
* The documentation has been updated to hint the connection between
the '--signoff' option and DCO.
* "git reflog" incorrectly assumed that all objects that used to be
at the tip of a ref must be commits, which caused it to segfault.
* The ignore mechanism saw a few regressions around untracked file
listing and sparse checkout selection areas in 2.7.0; the change
that is responsible for the regression has been reverted.
* Some codepaths used fopen(3) when opening a fixed path in $GIT_DIR
(e.g. COMMIT_EDITMSG) that is meant to be left after the command is
done. This however did not work well if the repository is set to
be shared with core.sharedRepository and the umask of the previous
user is tighter. They have been made to work better by calling
unlink(2) and retrying after fopen(3) fails with EPERM.
* Asking gitweb for a nonexistent commit left a warning in the server
log.
* "git rebase", unlike all other callers of "gc --auto", did not
ignore the exit code from "gc --auto".
* Many codepaths that run "gc --auto" before exiting kept packfiles
mapped and left the file descriptors to them open, which was not
friendly to systems that cannot remove files that are open. They
now close the packs before doing so.
* A recent optimization to filter-branch in v2.7.0 introduced a
regression when --prune-empty filter is used, which has been
corrected.
* The description for SANITY prerequisite the test suite uses has
been clarified both in the comment and in the implementation.
* "git tag" started listing a tag "foo" as "tags/foo" when a branch
named "foo" exists in the same repository; remove this unnecessary
disambiguation, which is a regression introduced in v2.7.0.
* The way "git svn" uses auth parameter was broken by Subversion
1.9.0 and later.
* The "split" subcommand of "git subtree" (in contrib/) incorrectly
skipped merges when it shouldn't, which was corrected.
* A few options of "git diff" did not work well when the command was
run from a subdirectory.
* dirname() emulation has been added, as Msys2 lacks it.
* The underlying machinery used by "ls-files -o" and other commands
have been taught not to create empty submodule ref cache for a
directory that is not a submodule. This removes a ton of wasted
CPU cycles.
* Drop a few old "todo" items by deciding that the change one of them
suggests is not such a good idea, and doing the change the other
one suggested to do.
* Documentation for "git fetch --depth" has been updated for clarity.
* The command line completion learned a handful of additional options
and command specific syntax.
Also includes a handful of documentation and test updates.
UI, Workflows & Features
* The appearance of "gitk", particularly on high DPI monitors, have
been improved. "gitk" also comes with an undated translation for
Swedish and Japanese.
* "git remote" learned "get-url" subcommand to show the URL for a
given remote name used for fetching and pushing.
* There was no way to defeat a configured rebase.autostash variable
from the command line, as "git rebase --no-autostash" was missing.
* "git log --date=local" used to only show the normal (default)
format in the local timezone. The command learned to take 'local'
as an instruction to use the local timezone with other formats,
* The refs used during a "git bisect" session is now per-worktree so
that independent bisect sessions can be done in different worktrees
created with "git worktree add".
* Users who are too busy to type three extra keystrokes to ask for
"git stash show -p" can now set stash.showPatch configuration
variable to true to always see the actual patch, not just the list
of paths affected with feel for the extent of damage via diffstat.
* "quiltimport" allows to specify the series file by honoring the
$QUILT_SERIES environment and also --series command line option.
* The use of 'good/bad' in "git bisect" made it confusing to use when
hunting for a state change that is not a regression (e.g. bugfix).
The command learned 'old/new' and then allows the end user to
say e.g. "bisect start --term-old=fast --term-new=slow" to find a
performance regression.
* "git interpret-trailers" can now run outside of a Git repository.
* "git p4" learned to reencode the pathname it uses to communicate
with the p4 depot with a new option.
* Give progress meter to "git filter-branch".
* Allow a later "!/abc/def" to override an earlier "/abc" that
appears in the same .gitignore file to make it easier to express
"everything in /abc directory is ignored, except for ...".
* Teach "git p4" to send large blobs outside the repository by
talking to Git LFS.
* Prepare for Git on-disk repository representation to undergo
backward incompatible changes by introducing a new repository
format version "1", with an extension mechanism.
* "git worktree" learned a "list" subcommand.
* "git clone --dissociate" learned that it can be used even when
"--reference" was not used at the same time.
* "git blame" learnt to take "--first-parent" and "--reverse" at the
same time when it makes sense.
* "git checkout" did not follow the usual "--[no-]progress"
convention and implemented only "--quiet" that is essentially
a superset of "--no-progress". Extend the command to support the
usual "--[no-]progress".
* The semantics of transfer.hideRefs configuration variable have been
extended to work better with the ref "namespace" feature that lets
you throw unrelated bunches of repositories in a single physical
repository and virtually serve them as separate ones.
* send-email config variables whose values are pathnames now go
through the ~username/ expansion.
* bash completion learnt to TAB-complete recipient addresses given
to send-email.
* The credential-cache daemon can be told to ignore SIGHUP to work
around issue when running Git from inside emacs.
* "git push" learned new configuration for doing "--recurse-submodules"
on each push.
* "format-patch" has learned a new option to zero-out the commit
object name on the mbox "From " line.
UI, Workflows & Features
* The bash completion script (in contrib/) learned a few options that
"git revert" takes.
* Whitespace breakages in deleted and context lines can also be
painted in the output of "git diff" and friends with the new
--ws-error-highlight option.
* List of commands shown by "git help" are grouped along the workflow
elements to help early learners.
* "git p4" now detects the filetype (e.g. binary) correctly even when
the files are opened exclusively.
* git p4 attempts to better handle branches in Perforce.
* "git p4" learned "--changes-block-size <n>" to read the changes in
chunks from Perforce, instead of making one call to "p4 changes"
that may trigger "too many rows scanned" error from Perforce.
* More workaround for Perforce's row number limit in "git p4".
* Unlike "$EDITOR" and "$GIT_EDITOR" that can hold the path to the
command and initial options (e.g. "/path/to/emacs -nw"), 'git p4'
did not let the shell interpolate the contents of the environment
variable that name the editor "$P4EDITOR" (and "$EDITOR", too).
This release makes it in line with the rest of Git, as well as with
Perforce.
* A new short-hand <branch>@{push} denotes the remote-tracking branch
that tracks the branch at the remote the <branch> would be pushed
to.
* "git show-branch --topics HEAD" (with no other arguments) did not
do anything interesting. Instead, contrast the given revision
against all the local branches by default.
* A replacement for contrib/workdir/git-new-workdir that does not
rely on symbolic links and make sharing of objects and refs safer
by making the borrowee and borrowers aware of each other.
Consider this as still an experimental feature; its UI is still
likely to change.
* Tweak the sample "store" backend of the credential helper to honor
XDG configuration file locations when specified.
* A heuristic we use to catch mistyped paths on the command line
"git <cmd> <revs> <pathspec>" is to make sure that all the non-rev
parameters in the later part of the command line are names of the
files in the working tree, but that means "git grep $str -- \*.c"
must always be disambiguated with "--", because nobody sane will
create a file whose name literally is asterisk-dot-see. Loosen the
heuristic to declare that with a wildcard string the user likely
meant to give us a pathspec.
* "git merge FETCH_HEAD" learned that the previous "git fetch" could
be to create an Octopus merge, i.e. recording multiple branches
that are not marked as "not-for-merge"; this allows us to lose an
old style invocation "git merge <msg> HEAD $commits..." in the
implementation of "git pull" script; the old style syntax can now
be deprecated (but not removed yet).
* Filter scripts were run with SIGPIPE disabled on the Git side,
expecting that they may not read what Git feeds them to filter.
We however treated a filter that does not read its input fully
before exiting as an error. We no longer do and ignore EPIPE
when writing to feed the filter scripts.
This changes semantics, but arguably in a good way. If a filter
can produce its output without fully consuming its input using
whatever magic, we now let it do so, instead of diagnosing it
as a programming error.
* Instead of dying immediately upon failing to obtain a lock, the
locking (of refs etc) retries after a short while with backoff.
* Introduce http.<url>.SSLCipherList configuration variable to tweak
the list of cipher suite to be used with libcURL when talking with
https:// sites.
* "git subtree" script (in contrib/) used "echo -n" to produce
progress messages in a non-portable way.
* "git subtree" script (in contrib/) does not have --squash option
when pushing, but the documentation and help text pretended as if
it did.
* The Git subcommand completion (in contrib/) no longer lists credential
helpers among candidates; they are not something the end user would
invoke interactively.
* The index file can be taught with "update-index --untracked-cache"
to optionally remember already seen untracked files, in order to
speed up "git status" in a working tree with tons of cruft.
* "git mergetool" learned to drive WinMerge as a backend.
* "git upload-pack" that serves "git fetch" can be told to serve
commits that are not at the tip of any ref, as long as they are
reachable from a ref, with uploadpack.allowReachableSHA1InWant
configuration variable.
* 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.
Ports
* Building on older MacOS X systems automatically sets
the necessary NO_APPLE_COMMON_CRYPTO build-time option.
* Building with NO_PTHREADS has been resurrected.
* Compilation options have been updated a bit to better support the
z/OS port.
UI, Workflows & Features
* "git archive" learned to filter what gets archived with a pathspec.
* "git config --edit --global" starts from a skeletal per-user
configuration file contents, instead of a total blank, when the
user does not already have any global config. This immediately
reduces the need to later ask "Have you forgotten to set
core.user?", and we can add more to the template as we gain
more experience.
* "git stash list -p" used to be almost always a no-op because each
stash entry is represented as a merge commit. It learned to show
the difference between the base commit version and the working tree
version, which is in line with what "git stash show" gives.
* Sometimes users want to report a bug they experience on their
repository, but they are not at liberty to share the contents of
the repository. "fast-export" was taught an "--anonymize" option
to replace blob contents, names of people, paths and log
messages with bland and simple strings to help them.
* "git difftool" learned an option to stop feeding paths to the
diff backend when it exits with a non-zero status.
* "git grep" learned to paint (or not paint) partial matches on
context lines when showing "grep -C<num>" output in color.
* "log --date=iso" uses a slight variant of the ISO 8601 format that is
more human readable. A new "--date=iso-strict" option gives
datetime output that conforms more strictly.
* The logic "git prune" uses is more resilient against various corner
cases.
* A broken reimplementation of Git could write an invalid index that
records both stage 0 and higher-stage entries for the same path.
We now notice and reject such an index, as there is no sensible
fallback (we do not know if the broken tool wanted to resolve and
forgot to remove the higher-stage entries, or if it wanted to unresolve
and forgot to remove the stage 0 entry).
* The temporary files "git mergetool" uses are renamed to avoid too
many dots in them (e.g. a temporary file for "hello.c" used to be
named e.g. "hello.BASE.4321.c" but now uses underscore instead,
e.g. "hello_BASE_4321.c", to allow us to have multiple variants).
* The temporary files "git mergetool" uses can be placed in a newly
created temporary directory, instead of the current directory, by
setting the mergetool.writeToTemp configuration variable.
* "git mergetool" understands "--tool bc" now, as version 4 of
BeyondCompare can be driven the same way as its version 3 and it
feels awkward to say "--tool bc3" to run version 4.
* The "pre-receive" and "post-receive" hooks are no longer required
to consume their input fully (not following this requirement used
to result in intermittent errors in "git push").
* The pretty-format specifier "%d", which expands to " (tagname)"
for a tagged commit, gained a cousin "%D" that just gives the
"tagname" without frills.
* "git push" learned "--signed" push, that allows a push (i.e.
request to update the refs on the other side to point at a new
history, together with the transmission of necessary objects) to be
signed, so that it can be verified and audited, using the GPG
signature of the person who pushed, that the tips of branches at a
public repository really point the commits the pusher wanted to,
without having to "trust" the server.
* "git interpret-trailers" is a new filter to programmatically edit
the tail end of the commit log messages, e.g. "Signed-off-by:".
* "git help everyday" shows the "Everyday Git in 20 commands or so"
document, whose contents have been updated to match more modern
Git practice.
* On the "git svn" front, work progresses to reduce memory consumption and
to improve handling of mergeinfo.
* "git push" over HTTP transport had an artificial limit on number of
refs that can be pushed imposed by the command line length.
* When receiving an invalid pack stream that records the same object
twice, multiple threads got confused due to a race.
* An attempt to remove the entire tree in the "git fast-import" input
stream caused it to misbehave.
* Reachability check (used in "git prune" and friends) did not add a
detached HEAD as a starting point to traverse objects still in use.
* "git config --add section.var val" used to lose existing
section.var whose value was an empty string.
* "git fsck" failed to report that it found corrupt objects via its
exit status in some cases.
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.
* "git submodule init" copied "submodule.$name.update" settings from
.gitmodules to .git/config without making sure if the suggested
value was sensible.
Git is a free and open source distributed version control system
designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with
speed and efficiency.
Git is easy to learn and has a tiny footprint with lightning fast
performance. It outclasses SCM tools like Subversion, CVS, Perforce,
and ClearCase with features like cheap local branching, convenient
staging areas, and multiple workflows.
This package contains only the git program (and subcommands). It does
not contain man pages or the tk-based repository browser.
adam
obache
richard
wiz