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.
Changelog:
Git v2.4.5 Release Notes
========================
Fixes since v2.4.4
------------------
* The setup code used to die when core.bare and core.worktree are set
inconsistently, even for commands that do not need working tree.
* There was a dead code that used to handle "git pull --tags" and
show special-cased error message, which was made irrelevant when
the semantics of the option changed back in Git 1.9 days.
* "color.diff.plain" was a misnomer; give it 'color.diff.context' as
a more logical synonym.
* The configuration reader/writer uses mmap(2) interface to access
the files; when we find a directory, it barfed with "Out of memory?".
* Recent "git prune" traverses young unreachable objects to safekeep
old objects in the reachability chain from them, which sometimes
showed unnecessary error messages that are alarming.
* "git rebase -i" fired post-rewrite hook when it shouldn't (namely,
when it was told to stop sequencing with 'exec' insn).
Also contains typofixes, documentation updates and trivial code
clean-ups.
Git v2.4.4 Release Notes
========================
Fixes since v2.4.3
------------------
* l10n updates for German.
* An earlier leakfix to bitmap testing code was incomplete.
* "git clean pathspec..." tried to lstat(2) and complain even for
paths outside the given pathspec.
* Communication between the HTTP server and http_backend process can
lead to a dead-lock when relaying a large ref negotiation request.
Diagnose the situation better, and mitigate it by reading such a
request first into core (to a reasonable limit).
* The clean/smudge interface did not work well when filtering an
empty contents (failed and then passed the empty input through).
It can be argued that a filter that produces anything but empty for
an empty input is nonsense, but if the user wants to do strange
things, then why not?
* Make "git stash something --help" error out, so that users can
safely say "git stash drop --help".
* Clarify that "log --raw" and "log --format=raw" are unrelated
concepts.
* Catch a programmer mistake to feed a pointer not an array to
ARRAY_SIZE() macro, by using a couple of GCC extensions.
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.
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.
------------------
* Commands that take pathspecs on the command line misbehaved when
the pathspec is given as an absolute pathname (which is a
practice not particularly encouraged) that points at a symbolic
link in the working tree.
* An earlier fix to the shell prompt script (in contrib/) for using
the PROMPT_COMMAND interface did not correctly check if the extra
code path needs to trigger, causing the branch name not to appear
when 'promptvars' option is disabled in bash or PROMPT_SUBST is
unset in zsh.
Do it for all packages that
* mention perl, or
* have a directory name starting with p5-*, or
* depend on a package starting with p5-
like last time, for 5.18, where this didn't lead to complaints.
Let me know if you have any this time.
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
ryoon
wiz
obache