* 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.
