4 Backward compatibility notes.
6 * Use of an empty string as a pathspec element that is used for
7 'everything matches' is still warned and Git asks users to use a
8 more explicit '.' for that instead. The hope is that existing
9 users will not mind this change, and eventually the warning can be
10 turned into a hard error, upgrading the deprecation into removal of
11 this (mis)feature. That is not scheduled to happen in the upcoming
14 * Git now avoids blindly falling back to ".git" when the setup
15 sequence said we are _not_ in Git repository. A corner case that
16 happens to work right now may be broken by a call to die("BUG").
17 We've tried hard to locate such cases and fixed them, but there
18 might still be cases that need to be addressed--bug reports are
21 * The experiment to improve the hunk-boundary selection of textual
22 diff output has finished, and the "indent heuristics" has now
29 UI, Workflows & Features
31 * The colors in which "git status --short --branch" showed the names
32 of the current branch and its remote-tracking branch are now
35 * "git clone" learned the "--no-tags" option not to fetch all tags
36 initially, and also set up the tagopt not to follow any tags in
39 * "git archive --format=zip" learned to use zip64 extension when
40 necessary to go beyond the 4GB limit.
42 * "git reset" learned "--recurse-submodules" option.
44 * "git diff --submodule=diff" now recurses into nested submodules.
46 * "git repack" learned to accept the --threads=<n> option and pass it
49 * "git send-email" learned to run sendemail-validate hook to inspect
50 and reject a message before sending it out.
52 * There is no good reason why "git fetch $there $sha1" should fail
53 when the $sha1 names an object at the tip of an advertised ref,
54 even when the other side hasn't enabled allowTipSHA1InWant.
56 * The recently introduced "[includeIf "gitdir:$dir"] path=..."
57 mechansim has further been taught to take symlinks into account.
58 The directory "$dir" specified in "gitdir:$dir" may be a symlink to
59 a real location, not something that $(getcwd) may return. In such
60 a case, a realpath of "$dir" is compared with the real path of the
61 current repository to determine if the contents from the named path
64 * Make the "indent" heuristics the default in "diff" and diff.indentHeuristics
65 configuration variable an escape hatch for those who do no want it.
67 * Many commands learned to pay attention to submodule.recurse
70 * The convention for a command line is to follow "git cmdname
71 --options" with revisions followed by an optional "--"
72 disambiguator and then finally pathspecs. When "--" is not there,
73 we make sure early ones are all interpretable as revs (and do not
74 look like paths) and later ones are the other way around. A
75 pathspec with "magic" (e.g. ":/p/a/t/h" that matches p/a/t/h from
76 the top-level of the working tree, no matter what subdirectory you
77 are working from) are conservatively judged as "not a path", which
78 required disambiguation more often. The command line parser
79 learned to say "it's a pathspec" a bit more often when the syntax
82 * Update "perl-compatible regular expression" support to enable JIT
83 and also allow linking with the newer PCRE v2 library.
85 * "filter-branch" learned a pseudo filter "--setup" that can be used
86 to define a common function/variable that can be used by other
89 * Using "git add d/i/r" when d/i/r is the top of the working tree of
90 a separate repository would create a gitlink in the index, which
91 would appear as a not-quite-initialized submodule to others. We
92 learned to give warnings when this happens.
95 Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.
97 * The default packed-git limit value has been raised on larger
98 platforms to save "git fetch" from a (recoverable) failure while
99 "gc" is running in parallel.
101 * Code to update the cache-tree has been tightened so that we won't
102 accidentally write out any 0{40} entry in the tree object.
104 * Attempt to allow us notice "fishy" situation where we fail to
105 remove the temporary directory used during the test.
107 * Travis CI gained a task to format the documentation with both
108 AsciiDoc and AsciiDoctor.
110 * Some platforms have ulong that is smaller than time_t, and our
111 historical use of ulong for timestamp would mean they cannot
112 represent some timestamp that the platform allows. Invent a
113 separate and dedicated timestamp_t (so that we can distingiuish
114 timestamps and a vanilla ulongs, which along is already a good
115 move), and then declare uintmax_t is the type to be used as the
118 * We can trigger Windows auto-build tester (credits: Dscho &
119 Microsoft) from our existing Travis CI tester now.
121 * Conversion from uchar[20] to struct object_id continues.
123 * Simplify parse_pathspec() codepath and stop it from looking at the
124 default in-core index.
126 * Add perf-test for wildmatch.
128 * Code from "conversion using external process" codepath has been
129 extracted to a separate sub-process.[ch] module.
131 * When "git checkout", "git merge", etc. manipulates the in-core
132 index, various pieces of information in the index extensions are
133 discarded from the original state, as it is usually not the case
134 that they are kept up-to-date and in-sync with the operation on the
135 main index. The untracked cache extension is copied across these
136 operations now, which would speed up "git status" (as long as the
137 cache is properly invalidated).
139 * The internal implementation of "git grep" has seen some clean-up.
141 * Update the C style recommendation for notes for translators, as
142 recent versions of gettext tools can work with our style of
145 * The implementation of "ref" API around the "packed refs" have been
146 cleaned up, in preparation for further changes.
148 * The internal logic used in "git blame" has been libified to make it
149 easier to use by cgit.
151 * Our code often opens a path to an optional file, to work on its
152 contents when we can successfully open it. We can ignore a failure
153 to open if such an optional file does not exist, but we do want to
154 report a failure in opening for other reasons (e.g. we got an I/O
155 error, or the file is there, but we lack the permission to open).
157 The exact errors we need to ignore are ENOENT (obviously) and
158 ENOTDIR (less obvious). Instead of repeating comparison of errno
159 with these two constants, introduce a helper function to do so.
161 * We often try to open a file for reading whose existence is
162 optional, and silently ignore errors from open/fopen; report such
163 errors if they are not due to missing files.
165 * When an existing repository is used for t/perf testing, we first
166 create bit-for-bit copy of it, which may grab a transient state of
167 the repository and freeze it into the repository used for testing,
168 which then may cause Git operations to fail. Single out "the index
169 being locked" case and forcibly drop the lock from the copy.
171 * Three instances of the same helper function have been consolidated
174 * "fast-import" uses a default pack chain depth that is consistent
175 with other parts of the system.
177 * A new test to show the interaction between the pattern [^a-z]
178 (which matches '/') and a slash in a path has been added. The
179 pattern should not match the slash with "pathmatch", but should
182 * The 'diff-highlight' program (in contrib/) has been restructured
183 for easier reuse by an external project 'diff-so-fancy'.
184 (merge 0c977dbc81 jk/diff-highlight-module later to maint).
186 * A common pattern to free a piece of memory and assign NULL to the
187 pointer that used to point at it has been replaced with a new
188 FREE_AND_NULL() macro.
191 Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
197 Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.13 in the maintenance
198 track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases'
201 * "git gc" did not interact well with "git worktree"-managed
204 * "git cherry-pick" and other uses of the sequencer machinery
205 mishandled a trailer block whose last line is an incomplete line.
206 This has been fixed so that an additional sign-off etc. are added
207 after completing the existing incomplete line.
209 * The codepath in "git am" that is used when running "git rebase"
210 leaked memory held for the log message of the commits being rebased.
212 * "git clone --config var=val" is a way to populate the
213 per-repository configuration file of the new repository, but it did
214 not work well when val is an empty string. This has been fixed.
216 * Setting "log.decorate=false" in the configuration file did not take
217 effect in v2.13, which has been corrected.
219 * A few codepaths in "checkout" and "am" working on an unborn branch
220 tried to access an uninitialized piece of memory.
222 * The Web interface to gmane news archive is long gone, even though
223 the articles are still accessible via NTTP. Replace the links with
224 ones to public-inbox.org. Because their message identification is
225 based on the actual message-id, it is likely that it will be easier
226 to migrate away from it if/when necessary.
228 * The receive-pack program now makes sure that the push certificate
229 records the same set of push options used for pushing.
231 * Tests have been updated to pass under GETTEXT_POISON (a mechanism
232 to ensure that output strings that should not be translated are
233 not translated by mistake), and TravisCI is told to run them.
235 * "git checkout --recurse-submodules" did not quite work with a
236 submodule that itself has submodules.
238 * "pack-objects" can stream a slice of an existing packfile out when
239 the pack bitmap can tell that the reachable objects are all needed
240 in the output, without inspecting individual objects. This
241 strategy however would not work well when "--local" and other
242 options are in use, and need to be disabled.
244 * Fix memory leaks pointed out by Coverity (and people).
246 * "git read-tree -m" (no tree-ish) gave a nonsense suggestion "use
247 --empty if you want to clear the index". With "-m", such a request
248 will still fail anyway, as you'd need to name at least one tree-ish
251 * Make sure our tests would pass when the sources are checked out
252 with "platform native" line ending convention by default on
253 Windows. Some "text" files out tests use and the test scripts
254 themselves that are meant to be run with /bin/sh, ought to be
255 checked out with eol=LF even on Windows.
257 * Introduce the BUG() macro to improve die("BUG: ...").
259 * Clarify documentation for include.path and includeIf.<condition>.path
260 configuration variables.
262 * Git sometimes gives an advice in a rhetorical question that does
263 not require an answer, which can confuse new users and non native
264 speakers. Attempt to rephrase them.
266 * A few http:// links that are redirected to https:// in the
267 documentation have been updated to https:// links.
269 * "git for-each-ref --format=..." with %(HEAD) in the format used to
270 resolve the HEAD symref as many times as it had processed refs,
271 which was wasteful, and "git branch" shared the same problem.
273 * Regression fix to topic recently merged to 'master'.
275 * The shell completion script (in contrib/) learned "git stash" has
276 a new "push" subcommand.
278 * "git interpret-trailers", when used as GIT_EDITOR for "git commit
279 -v", looked for and appended to a trailer block at the very end,
280 i.e. at the end of the "diff" output. The command has been
281 corrected to pay attention to the cut-mark line "commit -v" adds to
282 the buffer---the real trailer block should appear just before it.
284 * A test allowed both "git push" and "git receive-pack" on the other
285 end write their traces into the same file. This is OK on platforms
286 that allows atomically appending to a file opened with O_APPEND,
287 but on other platforms led to a mangled output, causing
288 intermittent test failures. This has been fixed by disabling
289 traces from "receive-pack" in the test.
291 * Tag objects, which are not reachable from any ref, that point at
292 missing objects were mishandled by "git gc" and friends (they
293 should silently be ignored instead)
295 * "git describe --contains" penalized light-weight tags so much that
296 they were almost never considered. Instead, give them about the
297 same chance to be considered as an annotated tag that is the same
298 age as the underlying commit would.
300 * The "run-command" API implementation has been made more robust
301 against dead-locking in a threaded environment.
303 * A recent update to t5545-push-options.sh started skipping all the
304 tests in the script when a web server testing is disabled or
305 unavailable, not just the ones that require a web server. Non HTTP
306 tests have been salvaged to always run in this script.
308 * "git send-email" now uses Net::SMTP::SSL, which is obsolete, only
309 when needed. Recent versions of Net::SMTP can do TLS natively.
311 * "foo\bar\baz" in "git fetch foo\bar\baz", even though there is no
312 slashes in it, cannot be a nickname for a remote on Windows, as
313 that is likely to be a pathname on a local filesystem.
315 * "git clean -d" used to clean directories that has ignored files,
316 even though the command should not lose ignored ones without "-x".
317 "git status --ignored" did not list ignored and untracked files
318 without "-uall". These have been corrected.
320 * The result from "git diff" that compares two blobs, e.g. "git diff
321 $commit1:$path $commit2:$path", used to be shown with the full
322 object name as given on the command line, but it is more natural to
323 use the $path in the output and use it to look up .gitattributes.
325 * The "collision detecting" SHA-1 implementation shipped with 2.13
326 was quite broken on some big-endian platforms and/or platforms that
327 do not like unaligned fetches. Update to the upstream code which
328 has already fixed these issues.
330 * "git am -h" triggered a BUG().
332 * The interaction of "url.*.insteadOf" and custom URL scheme's
333 whitelisting is now documented better.
335 * The timestamp of the index file is now taken after the file is
336 closed, to help Windows, on which a stale timestamp is reported by
337 fstat() on a file that is opened for writing and data was written
340 * "git pull --rebase --autostash" didn't auto-stash when the local history
341 fast-forwards to the upstream.
343 * A flaky test has been corrected.
345 * "git $cmd -h" for builtin commands calls the implementation of the
346 command (i.e. cmd_$cmd() function) without doing any repository
347 set-up, and the commands that expect RUN_SETUP is done by the Git
348 potty needs to be prepared to show the help text without barfing.
349 (merge d691551192 jk/consistent-h later to maint).
351 * Help contributors that visit us at GitHub.
353 * "git stash push <pathspec>" did not work from a subdirectory at all.
354 Bugfix for a topic in v2.13
356 * As there is no portable way to pass timezone information to
357 strftime, some output format from "git log" and friends are
358 impossible to produce. Teach our own strbuf_addftime to replace %z
359 and %Z with caller-supplied values to help working around this.
360 (merge 6eced3ec5e rs/strbuf-addftime-zZ later to maint).
362 * "git mergetool" learned to work around a wrapper MacOS X adds
363 around underlying meld.
364 (merge 0af85f84bd da/mergetools-meld-output-opt-on-macos later to maint).
366 * An example in documentation that does not work in multi worktree
367 configuration has been corrected.
368 (merge 773a88914f ah/doc-gitattributes-empty-index later to maint).
370 * The pretty-format specifiers like '%h', '%t', etc. had an
371 optimization that no longer works correctly. In preparation/hope
372 of getting it correctly implemented, first discard the optimization
374 (merge fe9e2aefd4 rs/pretty-add-again later to maint).
376 * The code to pick up and execute command alias definition from the
377 configuration used to switch to the top of the working tree and
378 then come back when the expanded alias was executed, which was
379 unnecessarilyl complex. Attempt to simplify the logic by using the
380 early-config mechanism that does not chdir around.
381 (merge a9bcf6586d js/alias-early-config later to maint).
383 * Fix configuration codepath to pay proper attention to commondir
384 that is used in multi-worktree situation, and isolate config API
385 into its own header file.
386 (merge dc8441fdb4 bw/config-h later to maint).
388 * Other minor doc, test and build updates and code cleanups.
389 (merge 68241cb9dd sb/t4005-modernize later to maint).