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 * The historical argument order "git merge <msg> HEAD <commit>..."
15 has been deprecated for quite some time, and is now removed.
17 * The default location "~/.git-credential-cache/socket" for the
18 socket used to communicate with the credential-cache daemon has
19 been moved to "~/.cache/git/credential/socket".
21 * Git now avoids blindly falling back to ".git" when the setup
22 sequence said we are _not_ in Git repository. A corner case that
23 happens to work right now may be broken by a call to die("BUG").
24 We've tried hard to locate such cases and fixed them, but there
25 might still be cases that need to be addressed--bug reports are
32 UI, Workflows & Features
34 * "git describe" and "git name-rev" have been taught to take more
35 than one refname patterns to restrict the set of refs to base their
36 naming output on, and also learned to take negative patterns to
37 name refs not to be used for naming via their "--exclude" option.
39 * Deletion of a branch "foo/bar" could remove .git/refs/heads/foo
40 once there no longer is any other branch whose name begins with
41 "foo/", but we didn't do so so far. Now we do.
43 * When "git merge" detects a path that is renamed in one history
44 while the other history deleted (or modified) it, it now reports
45 both paths to help the user understand what is going on in the two
46 histories being merged.
48 * The <url> part in "http.<url>.<variable>" configuration variable
49 can now be spelled with '*' that serves as wildcard.
50 E.g. "http.https://*.example.com.proxy" can be used to specify the
51 proxy used for https://a.example.com, https://b.example.com, etc.,
52 i.e. any host in the example.com domain.
54 * "git tag" did not leave useful message when adding a new entry to
55 reflog; this was left unnoticed for a long time because refs/tags/*
56 doesn't keep reflog by default.
58 * The "negative" pathspec feature was somewhat more cumbersome to use
59 than necessary in that its short-hand used "!" which needed to be
60 escaped from shells, and it required "exclude from what?" specified.
62 * The command line options for ssh invocation needs to be tweaked for
63 some implementations of SSH (e.g. PuTTY plink wants "-P <port>"
64 while OpenSSH wants "-p <port>" to specify port to connect to), and
65 the variant was guessed when GIT_SSH environment variable is used
66 to specify it. The logic to guess now applies to the command
67 specified by the newer GIT_SSH_COMMAND and also core.sshcommand
68 configuration variable, and comes with an escape hatch for users to
69 deal with misdetected cases.
71 * The "--git-path", "--git-common-dir", and "--shared-index-path"
72 options of "git rev-parse" did not produce usable output. They are
73 now updated to show the path to the correct file, relative to where
76 * "git diff -W" has been taught to handle the case where a new
77 function is added at the end of the file better.
79 * "git update-ref -d" and other operations to delete references did
80 not leave any entry in HEAD's reflog when the reference being
81 deleted was the current branch. This is not a problem in practice
82 because you do not want to delete the branch you are currently on,
83 but caused renaming of the current branch to something else not to
84 be logged in a useful way.
86 * "Cc:" on the trailer part does not have to conform to RFC strictly,
87 unlike in the e-mail header. "git send-email" has been updated to
88 ignore anything after '>' when picking addresses, to allow non-address
89 cruft like " # stable 4.4" after the address.
91 * When "git submodule init" decides that the submodule in the working
92 tree is its upstream, it now gives a warning as it is not a very
95 * "git stash push" takes a pathspec so that the local changes can be
96 stashed away only partially.
98 * Documentation for "git ls-files" did not refer to core.quotePath.
100 * The experimental "split index" feature has gained a few
101 configuration variables to make it easier to use.
103 * From a working tree of a repository, a new option of "rev-parse"
104 lets you ask if the repository is used as a submodule of another
105 project, and where the root level of the working tree of that
106 project (i.e. your superproject) is.
108 * The pathspec mechanism learned to further limit the paths that
109 match the pattern to those that have specified attributes attached
110 via the gitattributes mechanism.
112 * Our source code has used the SHA1_HEADER cpp macro after "#include"
113 in the C code to switch among the SHA-1 implementations. Instead,
114 list the exact header file names and switch among implementations
115 using "#ifdef BLK_SHA1/#include "block-sha1/sha1.h"/.../#endif";
116 this helps some IDE tools.
118 * The start-up sequence of "git" needs to figure out some configured
119 settings before it finds and set itself up in the location of the
120 repository and was quite messy due to its "chicken-and-egg" nature.
121 The code has been restructured.
123 * The command line prompt (in contrib/) learned a new 'tag' style
124 that can be specified with GIT_PS1_DESCRIBE_STYLE, to describe a
125 detached HEAD with "git describe --tags".
127 * The configuration file learned a new "includeIf.<condition>.path"
128 that includes the contents of the given path only when the
129 condition holds. This allows you to say "include this work-related
130 bit only in the repositories under my ~/work/ directory".
132 * Recent update to "rebase -i" started showing a message that is not
133 a warning with "warning:" prefix by mistake. This has been fixed.
135 * Recently we started passing the "--push-options" through the
136 external remote helper interface; now the "smart HTTP" remote
137 helper understands what to do with the passed information.
139 * "git describe --dirty" dies when it cannot be determined if the
140 state in the working tree matches that of HEAD (e.g. broken
141 repository or broken submodule). The command learned a new option
142 "git describe --broken" to give "$name-broken" (where $name is the
143 description of HEAD) in such a case.
145 * "git checkout" is taught the "--recurse-submodules" option.
147 * Recent enhancement to "git stash push" command to support pathspec
148 to allow only a subset of working tree changes to be stashed away
149 was found to be too chatty and exposed the internal implementation
150 detail (e.g. when it uses reset to match the index to HEAD before
151 doing other things, output from reset seeped out). These, and
152 other chattyness has been fixed.
154 * "git merge <message> HEAD <commit>" syntax that has been deprecated
155 since October 2007 has been removed.
157 * The refs completion for large number of refs has been sped up,
158 partly by giving up disambiguating ambiguous refs and partly by
159 eliminating most of the shell processing between 'git for-each-ref'
160 and 'ls-remote' and Bash's completion facility.
162 * On many keyboards, typing "@{" involves holding down SHIFT key and
163 one can easily end up with "@{Up..." when typing "@{upstream}". As
164 the upstream/push keywords do not appear anywhere else in the syntax,
165 we can safely accept them case insensitively without introducing
166 ambiguity or confusion to solve this.
168 * "git tag/branch/for-each-ref" family of commands long allowed to
169 filter the refs by "--contains X" (show only the refs that are
170 descendants of X), "--merged X" (show only the refs that are
171 ancestors of X), "--no-merged X" (show only the refs that are not
172 ancestors of X). One curious omission, "--no-contains X" (show
173 only the refs that are not descendants of X) has been added to
176 * The default behaviour of "git log" in an interactive session has
177 been changed to enable "--decorate".
179 * The output from "git status --short" has been extended to show
180 various kinds of dirtyness in submodules differently; instead of to
181 "M" for modified, 'm' and '?' can be shown to signal changes only
182 to the working tree of the submodule but not the commit that is
185 * Allow the http.postbuffer configuration variable to be set to a
186 size that can be expressed in size_t, which can be larger than
187 ulong on some platforms.
189 * "git rebase" learns "--signoff" option.
191 * The completion script (in contrib/) learned to complete "git push
192 --delete b<TAB>" to complete branch name to be deleted.
194 * "git worktree add --lock" allows to lock a worktree immediately
195 after it's created. This helps prevent a race between "git worktree
196 add; git worktree lock" and "git worktree prune".
198 * Completion for "git checkout <branch>" that auto-creates the branch
199 out of a remote tracking branch can now be disabled, as this
200 completion often gets in the way when completing to checkout an
201 existing local branch that happens to share the same prefix with
202 bunch of remote tracking branches.
205 Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.
207 * The code to list branches in "git branch" has been consolidated
208 with the more generic ref-filter API.
210 * Resource usage while enumerating refs from alternate object store
211 has been optimized to help receiving end of "push" that hosts a
212 repository with many "forks".
214 * The gitattributes machinery is being taught to work better in a
215 multi-threaded environment.
217 * "git rebase -i" starts using the recently updated "sequencer" code.
219 * Code and design clean-up for the refs API.
221 * The preload-index code has been taught not to bother with the index
222 entries that are paths that are not checked out by "sparse checkout".
224 * Some warning() messages from "git clean" were updated to show the
225 errno from failed system calls.
227 * The "parse_config_key()" API function has been cleaned up.
229 * A test that creates a confusing branch whose name is HEAD has been
230 corrected not to do so.
232 * The code that parses header fields in the commit object has been
233 updated for (micro)performance and code hygiene.
235 * An helper function to make it easier to append the result from
236 real_path() to a strbuf has been added.
238 * Reduce authentication round-trip over HTTP when the server supports
239 just a single authentication method. This also improves the
240 behaviour when Git is misconfigured to enable http.emptyAuth
241 against a server that does not authenticate without a username
242 (i.e. not using Kerberos etc., which makes http.emptyAuth
245 * Windows port wants to use OpenSSL's implementation of SHA-1
246 routines, so let them.
248 * The t/perf performance test suite was not prepared to test not so
249 old versions of Git, but now it covers versions of Git that are not
252 * Add 32-bit Linux variant to the set of platforms to be tested with
255 * "git branch --list" takes the "--abbrev" and "--no-abbrev" options
256 to control the output of the object name in its "-v"(erbose)
257 output, but a recent update started ignoring them; fix it before
258 the breakage reaches to any released version.
260 * Picking two versions of Git and running tests to make sure the
261 older one and the newer one interoperate happily has now become
264 * "git tag --contains" used to (ab)use the object bits to keep track
265 of the state of object reachability without clearing them after
266 use; this has been cleaned up and made to use the newer commit-slab
269 * The "debug" helper used in the test framework learned to run
270 a command under "gdb" interactively.
272 * The "detect attempt to create collisions" variant of SHA-1
273 implementation by Marc Stevens (CWI) and Dan Shumow (Microsoft)
274 has been integrated and made the default.
276 * The test framework learned to detect unterminated here documents.
278 * The name-hash used for detecting paths that are different only in
279 cases (which matter on case insensitive filesystems) has been
280 optimized to take advantage of multi-threading when it makes sense.
282 * An earlier version of sha1dc/sha1.c that was merged to 'master'
283 compiled incorrectly on Windows, which has been fixed.
285 * "what URL do we want to update this submodule?" and "are we
286 interested in this submodule?" are split into two distinct
287 concepts, and then the way used to express the latter got extended,
288 paving a way to make it easier to manage a project with many
289 submodules and make it possible to later extend use of multiple
290 worktrees for a project with submodules.
292 * Some debugging output from "git describe" were marked for l10n,
293 but some weren't. Mark missing ones for l10n.
295 * Define a new task in .travis.yml that triggers a test session on
296 Windows run elsewhere.
298 * Conversion from uchar[20] to struct object_id continues.
300 * The "submodule" specific field in the ref_store structure is
301 replaced with a more generic "gitdir" that can later be used also
302 when dealing with ref_store that represents the set of refs visible
303 from the other worktrees.
305 * The string-list API used a custom reallocation strategy that was
306 very inefficient, instead of using the usual ALLOC_GROW() macro,
307 which has been fixed.
308 (merge 950a234cbd jh/string-list-micro-optim later to maint).
310 * In a 2- and 3-way merge of trees, more than one source trees often
311 end up sharing an identical subtree; optimize by not reading the
312 same tree multiple times in such a case.
313 (merge d12a8cf0af jh/unpack-trees-micro-optim later to maint).
315 * The index file has a trailing SHA-1 checksum to detect file
316 corruption, and historically we checked it every time the index
317 file is used. Omit the validation during normal use, and instead
318 verify only in "git fsck".
320 * Having a git command on the upstream side of a pipe in a test
321 script will hide the exit status from the command, which may cause
322 us to fail to notice a breakage; rewrite tests in a script to avoid
325 * Travis CI learns to run coccicheck.
327 * "git checkout" that handles a lot of paths has been optimized by
328 reducing the number of unnecessary checks of paths in the
329 has_dir_name() function.
331 * The internals of the refs API around the cached refs has been
334 * Output from perf tests have been updated to align their titles.
336 Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
342 Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.12 in the maintenance
343 track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases'
346 * "git repack --depth=<n>" for a long time busted the specified depth
347 when reusing delta from existing packs. This has been corrected.
349 * The code to parse the command line "git grep <patterns>... <rev>
350 [[--] <pathspec>...]" has been cleaned up, and a handful of bugs
351 have been fixed (e.g. we used to check "--" if it is a rev).
353 * "git ls-remote" and "git archive --remote" are designed to work
354 without being in a directory under Git's control. However, recent
355 updates revealed that we randomly look into a directory called
356 .git/ without actually doing necessary set-up when working in a
357 repository. Stop doing so.
359 * "git show-branch" expected there were only very short branch names
360 in the repository and used a fixed-length buffer to hold them
361 without checking for overflow.
363 * A caller of tempfile API that uses stdio interface to write to
364 files may ignore errors while writing, which is detected when
365 tempfile is closed (with a call to ferror()). By that time, the
366 original errno that may have told us what went wrong is likely to
367 be long gone and was overwritten by an irrelevant value.
368 close_tempfile() now resets errno to EIO to make errno at least
371 * "git remote rm X", when a branch has remote X configured as the
372 value of its branch.*.remote, tried to remove branch.*.remote and
373 branch.*.merge and failed if either is unset.
375 * A "gc.log" file left by a backgrounded "gc --auto" disables further
376 automatic gc; it has been taught to run at least once a day (by
377 default) by ignoring a stale "gc.log" file that is too old.
379 * The code to parse "git -c VAR=VAL cmd" and set configuration
380 variable for the duration of cmd had two small bugs, which have
383 * user.email that consists of only cruft chars should consistently
384 error out, but didn't.
386 * "git upload-pack", which is a counter-part of "git fetch", did not
387 report a request for a ref that was not advertised as invalid.
388 This is generally not a problem (because "git fetch" will stop
389 before making such a request), but is the right thing to do.
391 * A leak in a codepath to read from a packed object in (rare) cases
394 * When a redirected http transport gets an error during the
395 redirected request, we ignored the error we got from the server,
396 and ended up giving a not-so-useful error message.
398 * The patch subcommand of "git add -i" was meant to have paths
399 selection prompt just like other subcommand, unlike "git add -p"
400 directly jumps to hunk selection. Recently, this was broken and
401 "add -i" lost the paths selection dialog, but it now has been
404 * Git v2.12 was shipped with an embarrassing breakage where various
405 operations that verify paths given from the user stopped dying when
406 seeing an issue, and instead later triggering segfault.
408 * There is no need for Python only to give a few messages to the
409 standard error stream, but we somehow did.
411 * The code to parse "git log -L..." command line was buggy when there
412 are many ranges specified with -L; overrun of the allocated buffer
415 * The command-line parsing of "git log -L" copied internal data
416 structures using incorrect size on ILP32 systems.
418 * "git diff --quiet" relies on the size field in diff_filespec to be
419 correctly populated, but diff_populate_filespec() helper function
420 made an incorrect short-cut when asked only to populate the size
421 field for paths that need to go through convert_to_git() (e.g. CRLF
424 * A few tests were run conditionally under (rare) conditions where
425 they cannot be run (like running cvs tests under 'root' account).
427 * "git branch @" created refs/heads/@ as a branch, and in general the
428 code that handled @{-1} and @{upstream} was a bit too loose in
431 * "git fetch" that requests a commit by object name, when the other
432 side does not allow such an request, failed without much
435 * "git filter-branch --prune-empty" drops a single-parent commit that
436 becomes a no-op, but did not drop a root commit whose tree is empty.
438 * Recent versions of Git treats http alternates (used in dumb http
439 transport) just like HTTP redirects and requires the client to
440 enable following it, due to security concerns. But we forgot to
441 give a warning when we decide not to honor the alternates.
443 * "git push" had a handful of codepaths that could lead to a deadlock
444 when unexpected error happened, which has been fixed.
446 * "Dumb http" transport used to misparse a nonsense http-alternates
447 response, which has been fixed.
449 * "git add -p <pathspec>" unnecessarily expanded the pathspec to a
450 list of individual files that matches the pathspec by running "git
451 ls-files <pathspec>", before feeding it to "git diff-index" to see
452 which paths have changes, because historically the pathspec
453 language supported by "diff-index" was weaker. These days they are
454 equivalent and there is no reason to internally expand it. This
455 helps both performance and avoids command line argument limit on
457 (merge 7288e12cce jk/add-i-use-pathspecs later to maint).
459 * "git status --porcelain" is supposed to give a stable output, but a
460 few strings were left as translatable by mistake.
462 * "git revert -m 0 $merge_commit" complained that reverting a merge
463 needs to say relative to which parent the reversion needs to
464 happen, as if "-m 0" weren't given. The correct diagnosis is that
465 "-m 0" does not refer to the first parent ("-m 1" does). This has
468 * Code to read submodule.<name>.ignore config did not state the
469 variable name correctly when giving an error message diagnosing
472 * Fix for NO_PTHREADS build.
474 * Fix for potential segv introduced in v2.11.0 and later (also
475 v2.10.2) to "git log --pickaxe-regex -S".
477 * A few unterminated here documents in tests were fixed, which in
478 turn revealed incorrect expectations the tests make. These tests
481 * Fix for NO_PTHREADS option.
482 (merge 2225e1ea20 bw/grep-recurse-submodules later to maint).
484 * Git now avoids blindly falling back to ".git" when the setup
485 sequence said we are _not_ in Git repository. A corner case that
486 happens to work right now may be broken by a call to die("BUG").
487 (merge b1ef400eec jk/no-looking-at-dotgit-outside-repo-final later to maint).
489 * A few commands that recently learned the "--recurse-submodule"
490 option misbehaved when started from a subdirectory of the
492 (merge b2dfeb7c00 bw/recurse-submodules-relative-fix later to maint).
494 * FreeBSD implementation of getcwd(3) behaved differently when an
495 intermediate directory is unreadable/unsearchable depending on the
496 length of the buffer provided, which our strbuf_getcwd() was not
497 aware of. strbuf_getcwd() has been taught to cope with it better.
498 (merge a54e938e5b rs/freebsd-getcwd-workaround later to maint).
500 * A recent update to "rebase -i" stopped running hooks for the "git
501 commit" command during "reword" action, which has been fixed.
503 * Removing an entry from a notes tree and then looking another note
504 entry from the resulting tree using the internal notes API
505 functions did not work as expected. No in-tree users of the API
506 has such access pattern, but it still is worth fixing.
508 * "git receive-pack" could have been forced to die by attempting
509 allocate an unreasonably large amount of memory with a crafted push
510 certificate; this has been fixed.
511 (merge f2214dede9 bc/push-cert-receive-fix later to maint).
513 * Update error handling for codepath that deals with corrupt loose
515 (merge 51054177b3 jk/loose-object-info-report-error later to maint).
517 * "git diff --submodule=diff" learned to work better in a project
518 with a submodule that in turn has its own submodules.
519 (merge 17b254cda6 sb/show-diff-for-submodule-in-diff-fix later to maint).
521 * Update the build dependency so that an update to /usr/bin/perl
522 etc. result in recomputation of perl.mak file.
523 (merge c59c4939c2 ab/regen-perl-mak-with-different-perl later to maint).
525 * "git push --recurse-submodules --push-option=<string>" learned to
526 propagate the push option recursively down to pushes in submodules.
528 * If a patch e-mail had its first paragraph after an in-body header
529 indented (even after a blank line after the in-body header line),
530 the indented line was mistook as a continuation of the in-body
531 header. This has been fixed.
532 (merge fd1062e52e lt/mailinfo-in-body-header-continuation later to maint).
534 * Clean up fallouts from recent tightening of the set-up sequence,
535 where Git barfs when repository information is accessed without
536 first ensuring that it was started in a repository.
537 (merge bccb22cbb1 jk/no-looking-at-dotgit-outside-repo later to maint).
539 * "git p4" used "name-rev HEAD" when it wants to learn what branch is
540 checked out; it should use "symbolic-ref HEAD".
541 (merge eff451101d ld/p4-current-branch-fix later to maint).
543 * "http.proxy" set to an empty string is used to disable the usage of
544 proxy. We broke this early last year.
545 (merge ae51d91105 sr/http-proxy-configuration-fix later to maint).
547 * $GIT_DIR may in some cases be normalized with all symlinks resolved
548 while "gitdir" path expansion in the pattern does not receive the
549 same treatment, leading to incorrect mismatch. This has been fixed.
551 * "git submodule" script does not work well with strange pathnames.
552 Protect it from a path with slashes in them, at least.
554 * "git fetch-pack" was not prepared to accept ERR packet that the
555 upload-pack can send with a human-readable error message. It
556 showed the packet contents with ERR prefix, so there was no data
557 loss, but it was redundant to say "ERR" in an error message.
558 (merge 8e2c7bef03 jt/fetch-pack-error-reporting later to maint).
560 * "ls-files --recurse-submodules" did not quite work well in a
561 project with nested submodules.
563 * gethostname(2) may not NUL terminate the buffer if hostname does
564 not fit; unfortunately there is no easy way to see if our buffer
565 was too small, but at least this will make sure we will not end up
566 using garbage past the end of the buffer.
567 (merge 5781a9a270 dt/xgethostname-nul-termination later to maint).
569 * A recent update broke "git add -p ../foo" from a subdirectory.
571 * While handy, "git_path()" is a dangerous function to use as a
572 callsite that uses it safely one day can be broken by changes
573 to other code that calls it. Reduction of its use continues.
574 (merge 16d2676c9e jk/war-on-git-path later to maint).
576 * The split-index code configuration code used an unsafe git_path()
577 function without copying its result out.
579 * Many stale HTTP(s) links have been updated in our documentation.
580 (merge 613416f0be jk/update-links-in-docs later to maint).
582 * Other minor doc, test and build updates and code cleanups.
583 (merge df2a6e38b7 jk/pager-in-use later to maint).
584 (merge 75ec4a6cb0 ab/branch-list-doc later to maint).
585 (merge 3e5b36c637 sg/skip-prefix-in-prettify-refname later to maint).
586 (merge 2c5e2865cc jk/fast-import-cleanup later to maint).
587 (merge 4473060bc2 ab/test-readme-updates later to maint).
588 (merge 48a96972fd ab/doc-submitting later to maint).
589 (merge f5c2bc2b96 jk/make-coccicheck-detect-errors later to maint).
590 (merge c105f563d1 cc/untracked later to maint).
591 (merge 8668976b53 jc/unused-symbols later to maint).
592 (merge fba275dc93 jc/bs-t-is-not-a-tab-for-sed later to maint).
593 (merge be6ed145de mm/ls-files-s-doc later to maint).
594 (merge 60b091c679 qp/bisect-docfix later to maint).
595 (merge 47242cd103 ah/diff-files-ours-theirs-doc later to maint).
596 (merge 35ad44cbd8 sb/submodule-rm-absorb later to maint).
597 (merge 0301f1fd92 va/i18n-perl-scripts later to maint).
598 (merge 733e064d98 vn/revision-shorthand-for-side-branch-log later to maint).
599 (merge 85999743e7 tb/doc-eol-normalization later to maint).
600 (merge 0747fb49fd jk/loose-object-fsck later to maint).
601 (merge d8f4481c4f jk/quarantine-received-objects later to maint).
602 (merge 7ba1ceef95 xy/format-patch-base later to maint).
603 (merge fa1912c89a rs/misc-cppcheck-fixes later to maint).
604 (merge f17d642d3b ab/push-cas-doc-n-test later to maint).
605 (merge 61e282425a ss/gitmodules-ignore-doc later to maint).
606 (merge 8d3047cd5b ss/submodule-shallow-doc later to maint).
607 (merge 1f9e18b772 jk/prio-queue-avoid-swap-with-self later to maint).
608 (merge 627fde1025 jk/submodule-init-segv-fix later to maint).
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