Git 2.12 Release Notes ====================== 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 HEAD ..." 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=" 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. Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc. * Commands that operate on a log message and add lines to the trailer blocks, such as "format-patch -s", "cherry-pick (-x|-s)", and "commit -s", have been taught to use the logic of and share the code with "git interpret-trailer". * The default Travis-CI configuration specifies newer P4 and GitLFS. * The "fast hash" that had disastrous performance issues in some corner cases has been retired from the internal diff. * The character width table has been updated to match Unicode 9.0 * Update the procedure to generate "tags" for developer support. * The codeflow of setting NOATIME and CLOEXEC on file descriptors Git opens has been simplified. * "git diff" and its family had two experimental heuristics to shift the contents of a hunk to make the patch easier to read. One of them turns out to be better than the other, so leave only the "--indent-heuristic" option and remove the other one. * A new submodule helper "git submodule embedgitdirs" to make it easier to move embedded .git/ directory for submodules in a superproject to .git/modules/ (and point the latter with the former that is turned into a "gitdir:" file) has been added. * "git push \\server\share\dir" has recently regressed and then fixed. A test has retroactively been added for this breakage. * Build updates for Cygwin. * The implementation of "real_path()" was to go there with chdir(2) and call getcwd(3), but this obviously wouldn't be usable in a threaded environment. Rewrite it to manually resolve relative paths including symbolic links in path components. * Adjust documentation to help AsciiDoctor render better while not breaking the rendering done by AsciiDoc. * The sequencer machinery has been further enhanced so that a later set of patches can start using it to reimplement "rebase -i". * Update the definition of the MacOSX test environment used by TravisCI. * Rewrite a scripted porcelain "git difftool" in C. * "make -C t failed" will now run only the tests that failed in the previous run. This is usable only when prove is not use, and gives a useless error message when run after "make clean", but otherwise is serviceable. * "uchar [40]" to "struct object_id" conversion continues. Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups. Fixes since v2.10 ----------------- Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.9 in the maintenance track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases' notes for details). * We often decide if a session is interactive by checking if the standard I/O streams are connected to a TTY, but isatty() that comes with Windows incorrectly returned true if it is used on NUL (i.e. an equivalent to /dev/null). This has been fixed. * "git svn" did not work well with path components that are "0", and some configuration variable it uses were not documented. * "git rev-parse --symbolic" failed with a more recent notation like "HEAD^-1" and "HEAD^!". * An empty directory in a working tree that can simply be nuked used to interfere while merging or cherry-picking a change to create a submodule directory there, which has been fixed.. * The code in "git push" to compute if any commit being pushed in the superproject binds a commit in a submodule that hasn't been pushed out was overly inefficient, making it unusable even for a small project that does not have any submodule but have a reasonable number of refs. * "git push --dry-run --recurse-submodule=on-demand" wasn't "--dry-run" in the submodules. * The output from "git worktree list" was made in readdir() order, and was unstable. * mergetool..trustExitCode configuration variable did not apply to built-in tools, but now it does. * "git p4" LFS support was broken when LFS stores an empty blob. * A corner case in merge-recursive regression that crept in during 2.10 development cycle has been fixed. * Transport with dumb http can be fooled into following foreign URLs that the end user does not intend to, especially with the server side redirects and http-alternates mechanism, which can lead to security issues. Tighten the redirection and make it more obvious to the end user when it happens. * Update the error messages from the dumb-http client when it fails to obtain loose objects; we used to give sensible error message only upon 404 but we now forbid unexpected redirects that needs to be reported with something sensible. * When diff.renames configuration is on (and with Git 2.9 and later, it is enabled by default, which made it worse), "git stash" misbehaved if a file is removed and another file with a very similar content is added. * "git diff --no-index" did not take "--no-abbrev" option. * "git difftool --dir-diff" had a minor regression when started from a subdirectory, which has been fixed. * "git commit --allow-empty --only" (no pathspec) with dirty index ought to be an acceptable way to create a new commit that does not change any paths, but it was forbidden, perhaps because nobody needed it so far. * Git 2.11 had a minor regression in "merge --ff-only" that competed with another process that simultaneously attempted to update the index. We used to explain what went wrong with an error message, but the new code silently failed. The error message has been resurrected. * A pathname that begins with "//" or "\\" on Windows is special but path normalization logic was unaware of it. * "git pull --rebase", when there is no new commits on our side since we forked from the upstream, should be able to fast-forward without invoking "git rebase", but it didn't. * The way to specify hotkeys to "xxdiff" that is used by "git mergetool" has been modernized to match recent versions of xxdiff. * Unlike "git am --abort", "git cherry-pick --abort" moved HEAD back to where cherry-pick started while picking multiple changes, when the cherry-pick stopped to ask for help from the user, and the user did "git reset --hard" to a different commit in order to re-attempt the operation. * Code cleanup in shallow boundary computation. * A recent update to receive-pack to make it easier to drop garbage objects made it clear that GIT_ALTERNATE_OBJECT_DIRECTORIES cannot have a pathname with a colon in it (no surprise!), and this in turn made it impossible to push into a repository at such a path. This has been fixed by introducing a quoting mechanism used when appending such a path to the colon-separated list. * The function usage_msg_opt() has been updated to say "fatal:" before the custom message programs give, when they want to die with a message about wrong command line options followed by the standard usage string. * "git index-pack --stdin" needs an access to an existing repository, but "git index-pack file.pack" to generate an .idx file that corresponds to a packfile does not. * Fix for NDEBUG builds. * A lazy "git push" without refspec did not internally use a fully specified refspec to perform 'current', 'simple', or 'upstream' push, causing unnecessary "ambiguous ref" errors. * "git p4" misbehaved when swapping a directory and a symbolic link. * Even though an fix was attempted in Git 2.9.3 days, but running "git difftool --dir-diff" from a subdirectory never worked. This has been fixed. * "git p4" that tracks multiple p4 paths imported a single changelist that touches files in these multiple paths as one commit, followed by many empty commits. This has been fixed. * A potential but unlikely buffer overflow in Windows port has been fixed. * When the http server gives an incomplete response to a smart-http rpc call, it could lead to client waiting for a full response that will never come. Teach the client side to notice this condition and abort the transfer. * Compression setting for producing packfiles were spread across three codepaths, one of which did not honor any configuration. Unify these so that all of them honor core.compression and pack.compression variables the same way. * "git fast-import" sometimes mishandled while rebalancing notes tree, which has been fixed. * Recent update to the default abbreviation length that auto-scales lacked documentation update, which has been corrected. * Leakage of lockfiles in the config subsystem has been fixed. * It is natural that "git gc --auto" may not attempt to pack everything into a single pack, and there is no point in warning when the user has configured the system to use the pack bitmap, leading to disabling further "gc". * "git archive" did not read the standard configuration files, and failed to notice a file that is marked as binary via the userdiff driver configuration. * "git blame --porcelain" misidentified the "previous" pair (aka "source") when contents came from two or more files. * "git rebase -i" with a recent update started showing an incorrect count when squashing more than 10 commits. * "git @{push}" on a detached HEAD used to segfault; it has been corrected to error out with a message. * Running "git add a/b" when "a" is a submodule correctly errored out, but without a meaningful error message. (merge 2d81c48fa7 sb/pathspec-errors later to maint). * Typing ^C to pager, which usually does not kill it, killed Git and took the pager down as a collateral damage in certain process-tree structure. This has been fixed. * "git mergetool" without any pathspec on the command line that is run from a subdirectory became no-op in Git v2.11 by mistake, which has been fixed. * Retire long unused/unmaintained gitview from the contrib/ area. (merge 3120925c25 sb/remove-gitview later to maint). * Tighten a test to avoid mistaking an extended ERE regexp engine as a PRE regexp engine. * An error message with an ASCII control character like '\r' in it can alter the message to hide its early part, which is problematic when a remote side gives such an error message that the local side will relay with a "remote: " prefix. (merge f290089879 jk/vreport-sanitize later to maint). * "git fsck" inspects loose objects more carefully now. (merge cce044df7f jk/loose-object-fsck later to maint). * A crashing bug introduced in v2.11 timeframe has been found (it is triggerable only in fast-import) and fixed. (merge abd5a00268 jk/clear-delta-base-cache-fix later to maint). * With an anticipatory tweak for remotes defined in ~/.gitconfig (e.g. "remote.origin.prune" set to true, even though there may or may not actually be "origin" remote defined in a particular Git repository), "git remote rename" and other commands misinterpreted and behaved as if such a non-existing remote actually existed. (merge e459b073fb js/remote-rename-with-half-configured-remote later to maint). * A few codepaths had to rely on a global variable when sorting elements of an array because sort(3) API does not allow extra data to be passed to the comparison function. Use qsort_s() when natively available, and a fallback implementation of it when not, to eliminate the need, which is a prerequisite for making the codepath reentrant. * "git fsck --connectivity-check" was not working at all. (merge a2b22854bd jk/fsck-connectivity-check-fix later to maint). * After starting "git rebase -i", which first opens the user's editor to edit the series of patches to apply, but before saving the contents of that file, "git status" failed to show the current state (i.e. you are in an interactive rebase session, but you have applied no steps yet) correctly. (merge df9ded4984 js/status-pre-rebase-i later to maint). * Test tweak for FreeBSD where /usr/bin/unzip is unsuitable to run our tests but /usr/local/bin/unzip is usable. (merge d98b2c5fce js/unzip-in-usr-bin-workaround later to maint). * "git p4" did not work well with multiple git-p4.mapUser entries on Windows. (merge c3c2b05776 gv/mingw-p4-mapuser later to maint). * "git help" enumerates executable files in $PATH; the implementation of "is this file executable?" on Windows has been optimized. (merge c755015f79 hv/mingw-help-is-executable later to maint). * Test tweaks for those who have default ACL in their git source tree that interfere with the umask test. (merge d549d21307 mm/reset-facl-before-umask-test later to maint). * Names of the various hook scripts must be spelled exactly, but on Windows, an .exe binary must be named with .exe suffix; notice $GIT_DIR/hooks/.exe as a valid hook. (merge 235be51fbe js/mingw-hooks-with-exe-suffix later to maint). * Asciidoctor, an alternative reimplementation of AsciiDoc, still needs some changes to work with documents meant to be formatted with AsciiDoc. "make USE_ASCIIDOCTOR=YesPlease" to use it out of the box to document our pages is getting closer to reality. * Correct command line completion (in contrib/) on "git svn" (merge 2cbad17642 ew/complete-svn-authorship-options later to maint). * Incorrect usage help message for "git worktree prune" has been fixed. (merge 2488dcab22 ps/worktree-prune-help-fix later to maint). * Adjust a perf test to new world order where commands that do require a repository are really strict about having a repository. (merge c86000c1a7 rs/p5302-create-repositories-before-tests later to maint). * "git log --graph" did not work well with "--name-only", even though other forms of "diff" output were handled correctly. (merge f5022b5fed jk/log-graph-name-only later to maint). * The push-options given via the "--push-options" option were not passed through to external remote helpers such as "smart HTTP" that are invoked via the transport helper. * The documentation explained what "git stash" does to the working tree (after stashing away the local changes) in terms of "reset --hard", which was exposing an unnecessary implementation detail. (merge 20a7e06172 tg/stash-doc-cleanup later to maint). * When "git p4" imports changelist that removes paths, it failed to convert pathnames when the p4 used encoding different from the one used on the Git side. This has been corrected. (merge a8b05162e8 ls/p4-path-encoding later to maint). * A new coccinelle rule that catches a check of !pointer before the pointer is free(3)d, which most likely is a bug. (merge ec6cd14c7a rs/cocci-check-free-only-null later to maint). * "ls-files" run with pathspec has been micro-optimized to avoid having to memmove(3) unnecessary bytes. (merge 96f6d3f61a rs/ls-files-partial-optim later to maint). * A hotfix for a topic already in 'master'. (merge a4d92d579f js/mingw-isatty later to maint). * Other minor doc, test and build updates and code cleanups. (merge f2627d9b19 sb/submodule-config-cleanup later to maint). (merge 384f1a167b sb/unpack-trees-cleanup later to maint). (merge 874444b704 rh/diff-orderfile-doc later to maint). (merge eafd5d9483 cw/doc-sign-off later to maint). (merge 0aaad415bc rs/absolute-pathdup later to maint). (merge 4432dd6b5b rs/receive-pack-cleanup later to maint). (merge 540a398e9c sg/mailmap-self later to maint). (merge 209df269a6 nd/rev-list-all-includes-HEAD-doc later to maint). (merge 941b9c5270 sb/doc-unify-bottom later to maint). (merge 2aaf37b62c jk/doc-remote-helpers-markup-fix later to maint). (merge e91461b332 jk/doc-submodule-markup-fix later to maint). (merge 8ab9740d9f dp/submodule-doc-markup-fix later to maint). (merge 0838cbc22f jk/tempfile-ferror-fclose-confusion later to maint). (merge 115a40add6 dr/doc-check-ref-format-normalize later to maint). (merge 133f0a299d gp/document-dotfiles-in-templates-are-not-copied later to maint). (merge 2b35a9f4c7 bc/blame-doc-fix later to maint). (merge 7e82388024 ps/doc-gc-aggressive-depth-update later to maint). (merge 9993a7c5f1 bc/worktree-doc-fix-detached later to maint). (merge e519eccdf4 rt/align-add-i-help-text later to maint).