2.18.0:
UI, Workflows & Features
* Rename detection logic that is used in "merge" and "cherry-pick" has
learned to guess when all of x/a, x/b and x/c have moved to z/a,
z/b and z/c, it is likely that x/d added in the meantime would also
want to move to z/d by taking the hint that the entire directory
'x' moved to 'z'. A bug causing dirty files involved in a rename
to be overwritten during merge has also been fixed as part of this
work. Incidentally, this also avoids updating a file in the
working tree after a (non-trivial) merge whose result matches what
our side originally had.
* "git filter-branch" learned to use a different exit code to allow
the callers to tell the case where there was no new commits to
rewrite from other error cases.
* When built with more recent cURL, GIT_SSL_VERSION can now specify
"tlsv1.3" as its value.
* "git gui" learned that "~/.ssh/id_ecdsa.pub" and
"~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub" are also possible SSH key files.
(merge 2e2f0288ef bb/git-gui-ssh-key-files later to maint).
* "git gui" performs commit upon CTRL/CMD+ENTER but the
CTRL/CMD+KP_ENTER (i.e. enter key on the numpad) did not have the
same key binding. It now does.
(merge 28a1d94a06 bp/git-gui-bind-kp-enter later to maint).
* "git gui" has been taught to work with old versions of tk (like
8.5.7) that do not support "ttk::style theme use" as a way to query
the current theme.
(merge 4891961105 cb/git-gui-ttk-style later to maint).
* "git rebase" has learned to honor "--signoff" option when using
backends other than "am" (but not "--preserve-merges").
* "git branch --list" during an interrupted "rebase -i" now lets
users distinguish the case where a detached HEAD is being rebased
and a normal branch is being rebased.
* "git mergetools" learned talking to guiffy.
* The scripts in contrib/emacs/ have outlived their usefulness and
have been replaced with a stub that errors out and tells the user
there are replacements.
* The new "working-tree-encoding" attribute can ask Git to convert the
contents to the specified encoding when checking out to the working
tree (and the other way around when checking in).
* The "git config" command uses separate options e.g. "--int",
"--bool", etc. to specify what type the caller wants the value to
be interpreted as. A new "--type=<typename>" option has been
introduced, which would make it cleaner to define new types.
* "git config --get" learned the "--default" option, to help the
calling script. Building on top of the above changes, the
"git config" learns "--type=color" type. Taken together, you can
do things like "git config --get foo.color --default blue" and get
the ANSI color sequence for the color given to foo.color variable,
or "blue" if the variable does not exist.
* "git ls-remote" learned an option to allow sorting its output based
on the refnames being shown.
* The command line completion (in contrib/) has been taught that "git
stash save" has been deprecated ("git stash push" is the preferred
spelling in the new world) and does not offer it as a possible
completion candidate when "git stash push" can be.
* "git gc --prune=nonsense" spent long time repacking and then
silently failed when underlying "git prune --expire=nonsense"
failed to parse its command line. This has been corrected.
* Error messages from "git push" can be painted for more visibility.
* "git http-fetch" (deprecated) had an optional and experimental
"feature" to fetch only commits and/or trees, which nobody used.
This has been removed.
* The functionality of "$GIT_DIR/info/grafts" has been superseded by
the "refs/replace/" mechanism for some time now, but the internal
code had support for it in many places, which has been cleaned up
in order to drop support of the "grafts" mechanism.
* "git worktree add" learned to check out an existing branch.
* "git --no-pager cmd" did not have short-and-sweet single letter
option. Now it does as "-P".
(merge 7213c28818 js/no-pager-shorthand later to maint).
* "git rebase" learned "--rebase-merges" to transplant the whole
topology of commit graph elsewhere.
* "git status" learned to pay attention to UI related diff
configuration variables such as diff.renames.
* The command line completion mechanism (in contrib/) learned to load
custom completion file for "git $command" where $command is a
custom "git-$command" that the end user has on the $PATH when using
newer version of bash-completion.
* "git send-email" can sometimes offer confirmation dialog "Send this
email?" with choices 'Yes', 'No', 'Quit', and 'All'. A new action
'Edit' has been added to this dialog's choice.
* With merge.renames configuration set to false, the recursive merge
strategy can be told not to spend cycles trying to find renamed
paths and merge them accordingly.
* "git status" learned to honor a new status.renames configuration to
skip rename detection, which could be useful for those who want to
do so without disabling the default rename detection done by the
"git diff" command.
* Command line completion (in contrib/) learned to complete pathnames
for various commands better.
* "git blame" learns to unhighlight uninteresting metadata from the
originating commit on lines that are the same as the previous one,
and also paint lines in different colors depending on the age of
the commit.
* Transfer protocol v2 learned to support the partial clone.
* When a short hexadecimal string is used to name an object but there
are multiple objects that share the string as the prefix of their
names, the code lists these ambiguous candidates in a help message.
These object names are now sorted according to their types for
easier eyeballing.
* "git fetch $there $refspec" that talks over protocol v2 can take
advantage of server-side ref filtering; the code has been extended
so that this mechanism triggers also when fetching with configured
refspec.
* Our HTTP client code used to advertise that we accept gzip encoding
from the other side; instead, just let cURL library to advertise
and negotiate the best one.
* "git p4" learned to "unshelve" shelved commit from P4.
(merge 123f631761 ld/p4-unshelve later to maint).
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 and other notable changes.
* Use of an empty string as a pathspec element 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).
* Git now avoids blindly falling back to ".git" when the setup
sequence said we are _not_ in Git repository. A corner case that
happens to work right now may be broken by a call to die("BUG").
We've tried hard to locate such cases and fixed them, but there
might still be cases that need to be addressed--bug reports are
greatly appreciated.
* The experiment to improve the hunk-boundary selection of textual
diff output has finished, and the "indent heuristics" has now
become the default.
* Git can now be built with PCRE v2 instead of v1 of the PCRE
library. Replace USE_LIBPCRE=YesPlease with USE_LIBPCRE2=YesPlease
in existing build scripts to build against the new version. As the
upstream PCRE maintainer has abandoned v1 maintenance for all but
the most critical bug fixes, use of v2 is recommended.
Updates since v2.13
-------------------
UI, Workflows & Features
* The colors in which "git status --short --branch" showed the names
of the current branch and its remote-tracking branch are now
configurable.
* "git clone" learned the "--no-tags" option not to fetch all tags
initially, and also set up the tagopt not to follow any tags in
subsequent fetches.
* "git archive --format=zip" learned to use zip64 extension when
necessary to go beyond the 4GB limit.
* "git reset" learned "--recurse-submodules" option.
* "git diff --submodule=diff" now recurses into nested submodules.
* "git repack" learned to accept the --threads=<n> option and pass it
to pack-objects.
* "git send-email" learned to run sendemail-validate hook to inspect
and reject a message before sending it out.
* There is no good reason why "git fetch $there $sha1" should fail
when the $sha1 names an object at the tip of an advertised ref,
even when the other side hasn't enabled allowTipSHA1InWant.
* The "[includeIf "gitdir:$dir"] path=..." mechanism introduced in
2.13.0 would canonicalize the path of the gitdir being matched,
and did not match e.g. "gitdir:~/work/*" against a repo in
"~/work/main" if "~/work" was a symlink to "/mnt/storage/work".
Now we match both the resolved canonical path and what "pwd" would
show. The include will happen if either one matches.
* The "indent" heuristics is now the default in "diff". The
diff.indentHeuristic configuration variable can be set to "false"
for those who do not want it.
* Many commands learned to pay attention to submodule.recurse
configuration.
* The convention for a command line is to follow "git cmdname
--options" with revisions followed by an optional "--"
disambiguator and then finally pathspecs. When "--" is not there,
we make sure early ones are all interpretable as revs (and do not
look like paths) and later ones are the other way around. A
pathspec with "magic" (e.g. ":/p/a/t/h" that matches p/a/t/h from
the top-level of the working tree, no matter what subdirectory you
are working from) are conservatively judged as "not a path", which
required disambiguation more often. The command line parser
learned to say "it's a pathspec" a bit more often when the syntax
looks like so.
* Update "perl-compatible regular expression" support to enable JIT
and also allow linking with the newer PCRE v2 library.
* "filter-branch" learned a pseudo filter "--setup" that can be used
to define common functions/variables that can be used by other
filters.
* Using "git add d/i/r" when d/i/r is the top of the working tree of
a separate repository would create a gitlink in the index, which
would appear as a not-quite-initialized submodule to others. We
learned to give warnings when this happens.
* "git status" learned to optionally give how many stash entries there
are in its output.
* "git status" has long shown essentially the same message as "git
commit"; the message it gives while preparing for the root commit,
i.e. "Initial commit", was hard to understand for some new users.
Now it says "No commits yet" to stress more on the current status
(rather than the commit the user is preparing for, which is more in
line with the focus of "git commit").
* "git send-email" now has --batch-size and --relogin-delay options
which can be used to overcome limitations on SMTP servers that
restrict on how many of e-mails can be sent in a single session.
* An old message shown in the commit log template was removed, as it
has outlived its usefulness.
* "git pull --rebase --recurse-submodules" learns to rebase the
branch in the submodules to an updated base.
* "git log" learned -P as a synonym for --perl-regexp, "git grep"
already had such a synonym.
* "git log" didn't understand --regexp-ignore-case when combined with
--perl-regexp. This has been fixed.
Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.
* The default packed-git limit value has been raised on larger
platforms to save "git fetch" from a (recoverable) failure while
"gc" is running in parallel.
* Code to update the cache-tree has been tightened so that we won't
accidentally write out any 0{40} entry in the tree object.
* Attempt to allow us notice "fishy" situation where we fail to
remove the temporary directory used during the test.
* Travis CI gained a task to format the documentation with both
AsciiDoc and AsciiDoctor.
* Some platforms have ulong that is smaller than time_t, and our
historical use of ulong for timestamp would mean they cannot
represent some timestamp that the platform allows. Invent a
separate and dedicated timestamp_t (so that we can distingiuish
timestamps and a vanilla ulongs, which along is already a good
move), and then declare uintmax_t is the type to be used as the
timestamp_t.
* We can trigger Windows auto-build tester (credits: Dscho &
Microsoft) from our existing Travis CI tester now.
* Conversion from uchar[20] to struct object_id continues.
* Simplify parse_pathspec() codepath and stop it from looking at the
default in-core index.
* Add perf-test for wildmatch.
* Code from "conversion using external process" codepath has been
extracted to a separate sub-process.[ch] module.
* When "git checkout", "git merge", etc. manipulates the in-core
index, various pieces of information in the index extensions are
discarded from the original state, as it is usually not the case
that they are kept up-to-date and in-sync with the operation on the
main index. The untracked cache extension is copied across these
operations now, which would speed up "git status" (as long as the
cache is properly invalidated).
* The internal implementation of "git grep" has seen some clean-up.
* Update the C style recommendation for notes for translators, as
recent versions of gettext tools can work with our style of
multi-line comments.
* The implementation of "ref" API around the "packed refs" have been
cleaned up, in preparation for further changes.
* The internal logic used in "git blame" has been libified to make it
easier to use by cgit.
* Our code often opens a path to an optional file, to work on its
contents when we can successfully open it. We can ignore a failure
to open if such an optional file does not exist, but we do want to
report a failure in opening for other reasons (e.g. we got an I/O
error, or the file is there, but we lack the permission to open).
The exact errors we need to ignore are ENOENT (obviously) and
ENOTDIR (less obvious). Instead of repeating comparison of errno
with these two constants, introduce a helper function to do so.
* We often try to open a file for reading whose existence is
optional, and silently ignore errors from open/fopen; report such
errors if they are not due to missing files.
* When an existing repository is used for t/perf testing, we first
create bit-for-bit copy of it, which may grab a transient state of
the repository and freeze it into the repository used for testing,
which then may cause Git operations to fail. Single out "the index
being locked" case and forcibly drop the lock from the copy.
* Three instances of the same helper function have been consolidated
to one.
* "fast-import" uses a default pack chain depth that is consistent
with other parts of the system.
* A new test to show the interaction between the pattern [^a-z]
(which matches '/') and a slash in a path has been added. The
pattern should not match the slash with "pathmatch", but should
with "wildmatch".
* The 'diff-highlight' program (in contrib/) has been restructured
for easier reuse by an external project 'diff-so-fancy'.
* A common pattern to free a piece of memory and assign NULL to the
pointer that used to point at it has been replaced with a new
FREE_AND_NULL() macro.
* Traditionally, the default die() routine had a code to prevent it
from getting called multiple times, which interacted badly when a
threaded program used it (one downside is that the real error may
be hidden and instead the only error message given to the user may
end up being "die recursion detected", which is not very useful).
* Introduce a "repository" object to eventually make it easier to
work in multiple repositories (the primary focus is to work with
the superproject and its submodules) in a single process.
* Optimize "what are the object names already taken in an alternate
object database?" query that is used to derive the length of prefix
an object name is uniquely abbreviated to.
* The hashmap API has been updated so that data to customize the
behaviour of the comparison function can be specified at the time a
hashmap is initialized.
* The "collision detecting" SHA-1 implementation shipped with 2.13 is
now integrated into git.git as a submodule (the first submodule to
ship with git.git). Clone git.git with --recurse-submodules to get
it. For now a non-submodule copy of the same code is also shipped
as part of the tree.
* A recent update made it easier to use "-fsanitize=" option while
compiling but supported only one sanitize option. Allow more than
one to be combined, joined with a comma, like "make SANITIZE=foo,bar".
* Use "p4 -G" to make "p4 changes" output more Python-friendly
to parse.
* We started using "%" PRItime, imitating "%" PRIuMAX and friends, as
a way to format the internal timestamp value, but this does not
play well with gettext(1) i18n framework, and causes "make pot"
that is run by the l10n coordinator to create a broken po/git.pot
file. This is a possible workaround for that problem.
* It turns out that Cygwin also needs the fopen() wrapper that
returns failure when a directory is opened for reading.
======================
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.
Fixes since v2.9.1
------------------
* A fix merged to v2.9.1 had a few tests that are not meant to be
run on platforms without 64-bit long, which caused unnecessary
test failures on them because we didn't detect the platform and
skip them. These tests are now skipped on platforms that they
are not applicable to.
Fixes since v2.9
----------------
* When "git daemon" is run without --[init-]timeout specified, a
connection from a client that silently goes offline can hang around
for a long time, wasting resources. The socket-level KEEPALIVE has
been enabled to allow the OS to notice such failed connections.
* The commands in `git log` family take %C(auto) in a custom format
string. This unconditionally turned the color on, ignoring
--no-color or with --color=auto when the output is not connected to
a tty; this was corrected to make the format truly behave as
"auto".
* "git rev-list --count" whose walk-length is limited with "-n"
option did not work well with the counting optimized to look at the
bitmap index.
* "git show -W" (extend hunks to cover the entire function, delimited
by lines that match the "funcname" pattern) used to show the entire
file when a change added an entire function at the end of the file,
which has been fixed.
* The documentation set has been updated so that literal commands,
configuration variables and environment variables are consistently
typeset in fixed-width font and bold in manpages.
* "git svn propset" subcommand that was added in 2.3 days is
documented now.
* The documentation tries to consistently spell "GPG"; when
referring to the specific program name, "gpg" is used.
* "git reflog" stopped upon seeing an entry that denotes a branch
creation event (aka "unborn"), which made it appear as if the
reflog was truncated.
* The git-prompt scriptlet (in contrib/) was not friendly with those
who uses "set -u", which has been fixed.
* A codepath that used alloca(3) to place an unbounded amount of data
on the stack has been updated to avoid doing so.
* "git update-index --add --chmod=+x file" may be usable as an escape
hatch, but not a friendly thing to force for people who do need to
use it regularly. "git add --chmod=+x file" can be used instead.
* Build improvements for gnome-keyring (in contrib/)
* "git status" used to say "working directory" when it meant "working
tree".
* Comments about misbehaving FreeBSD shells have been clarified with
the version number (9.x and before are broken, newer ones are OK).
* "git cherry-pick A" worked on an unborn branch, but "git
cherry-pick A..B" didn't.
* "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.
* "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.
* The ownership rule for the piece of memory that hold references to
be fetched in "git fetch" was screwy, which has been cleaned up.
* "git bisect" makes an internal call to "git diff-tree" when
bisection finds the culprit, but this call did not initialize the
data structure to pass to the diff-tree API correctly.
* Formats of the various data (and how to validate them) where we use
GPG signature have been documented.
* Fix an unintended regression in v2.9 that breaks "clone --depth"
that recurses down to submodules by forcing the submodules to also
be cloned shallowly, which many server instances that host upstream
of the submodules are not prepared for.
* Fix unnecessarily waste in the idiomatic use of ': ${VAR=default}'
to set the default value, without enclosing it in double quotes.
* Some platform-specific code had non-ANSI strict declarations of C
functions that do not take any parameters, which has been
corrected.
* The internal code used to show local timezone offset is not
prepared to handle timestamps beyond year 2100, and gave a
bogus offset value to the caller. Use a more benign looking
+0000 instead and let "git log" going in such a case, instead
of aborting.
* One among four invocations of readlink(1) in our test suite has
been rewritten so that the test can run on systems without the
command (others are in valgrind test framework and t9802).
* t/perf needs /usr/bin/time with GNU extension; the invocation of it
is updated to "gtime" on Darwin.
* A bug, which caused "git p4" while running under verbose mode to
report paths that are omitted due to branch prefix incorrectly, has
been fixed; the command said "Ignoring file outside of prefix" for
paths that are _inside_.
* The top level documentation "git help git" still pointed at the
documentation set hosted at now-defunct google-code repository.
Update it to point to https://git.github.io/htmldocs/git.html
instead.
Also contains minor documentation updates and code clean-ups.
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.
wiz
adam
ryoon
obache