1 Git v2.9.4 Release Notes
2 ========================
7 * There are certain house-keeping tasks that need to be performed at
8 the very beginning of any Git program, and programs that are not
9 built-in commands had to do them exactly the same way as "git"
10 potty does. It was easy to make mistakes in one-off standalone
11 programs (like test helpers). A common "main()" function that
12 calls cmd_main() of individual program has been introduced to
13 make it harder to make mistakes.
15 * "git merge" with renormalization did not work well with
16 merge-recursive, due to "safer crlf" conversion kicking in when it
19 * The reflog output format is documented better, and a new format
20 --date=unix to report the seconds-since-epoch (without timezone)
23 * "git push --force-with-lease" already had enough logic to allow
24 ensuring that such a push results in creation of a ref (i.e. the
25 receiving end did not have another push from sideways that would be
26 discarded by our force-pushing), but didn't expose this possibility
27 to the users. It does so now.
29 * "import-tars" fast-import script (in contrib/) used to ignore a
30 hardlink target and replaced it with an empty file, which has been
31 corrected to record the same blob as the other file the hardlink is
34 * "git mv dir non-existing-dir/" did not work in some environments
35 the same way as existing mainstream platforms. The code now moves
36 "dir" to "non-existing-dir", without relying on rename("A", "B/")
37 that strips the trailing slash of '/'.
39 * The "t/" hierarchy is prone to get an unusual pathname; "make test"
40 has been taught to make sure they do not contain paths that cannot
41 be checked out on Windows (and the mechanism can be reusable to
42 catch pathnames that are not portable to other platforms as need
45 * When "git merge-recursive" works on history with many criss-cross
46 merges in "verbose" mode, the names the command assigns to the
47 virtual merge bases could have overwritten each other by unintended
48 reuse of the same piece of memory.
50 * "git checkout --detach <branch>" used to give the same advice
51 message as that is issued when "git checkout <tag>" (or anything
52 that is not a branch name) is given, but asking with "--detach" is
53 an explicit enough sign that the user knows what is going on. The
54 advice message has been squelched in this case.
56 * "git difftool" by default ignores the error exit from the backend
57 commands it spawns, because often they signal that they found
58 differences by exiting with a non-zero status code just like "diff"
59 does; the exit status codes 126 and above however are special in
60 that they are used to signal that the command is not executable,
61 does not exist, or killed by a signal. "git difftool" has been
62 taught to notice these exit status codes.
64 * On Windows, help.browser configuration variable used to be ignored,
65 which has been corrected.
67 * The "git -c var[=val] cmd" facility to append a configuration
68 variable definition at the end of the search order was described in
69 git(1) manual page, but not in git-config(1), which was more likely
70 place for people to look for when they ask "can I make a one-shot
71 override, and if so how?"
73 * The tempfile (hence its user lockfile) API lets the caller to open
74 a file descriptor to a temporary file, write into it and then
75 finalize it by first closing the filehandle and then either
76 removing or renaming the temporary file. When the process spawns a
77 subprocess after obtaining the file descriptor, and if the
78 subprocess has not exited when the attempt to remove or rename is
79 made, the last step fails on Windows, because the subprocess has
80 the file descriptor still open. Open tempfile with O_CLOEXEC flag
81 to avoid this (on Windows, this is mapped to O_NOINHERIT).
83 * "git-shell" rejects a request to serve a repository whose name
84 begins with a dash, which makes it no longer possible to get it
85 confused into spawning service programs like "git-upload-pack" with
86 an option like "--help", which in turn would spawn an interactive
87 pager, instead of working with the repository user asked to access
88 (i.e. the one whose name is "--help").
90 Also contains minor documentation updates and code clean-ups.