git-2.21.0

[Bruce Dubbs]

New minor version.

[Bruce Dubbs]

Backward Compatibility Notes

• Historically, the "-m" (mainline) option can only be used for "git cherry-pick" and "git revert" when working with a merge commit. This version of Git no longer warns or errors out when working with a single-parent commit, as long as the argument to the "-m" option is 1 (i.e. it has only one parent, and the request is to pick or revert relative to that first parent). Scripts that relied on the behaviour may get broken with this change.

Updates since v2.20

• The "http.version" configuration variable can be used with recent enough versions of cURL library to force the version of HTTP used to talk when fetching and pushing.

• Small fixes and features for fast-export and fast-import, mostly on the fast-export side has been made.

• "git push $there $src:$dst" rejects when $dst is not a fully qualified refname and it is not clear what the end user meant. The codepath has been taught to give a clearer error message, and also guess where the push should go by taking the type of the pushed object into account (e.g. a tag object would want to go under refs/tags/).

• "git checkout [<tree-ish>] path..." learned to report the number of paths that have been checked out of the index or the tree-ish, which gives it the same degree of noisy-ness as the case in which the command checks out a branch. "git checkout -m <pathspec>" to undo conflict resolution gives a similar message.

• "git quiltimport" learned "--keep-non-patch" option.

• "git worktree remove" and "git worktree move" refused to work when there is a submodule involved. This has been loosened to ignore uninitialized submodules.

• "git cherry-pick -m1" was forbidden when picking a non-merge commit, even though there _is_ parent number 1 for such a commit. This was done to avoid mistakes back when "cherry-pick" was about picking a single commit, but is no longer useful with "cherry-pick" that can pick a range of commits. Now the "-m$num" option is allowed when picking any commit, as long as $num names an existing parent of the commit.
• Update "git multimail" from the upstream.

• "git p4" update.

• The "--format=<placeholder>" option of for-each-ref, branch and tag learned to show a few more traits of objects that can be learned by the object_info API.

• "git rebase -i" learned to re-execute a command given with 'exec' to run after it failed the last time.

• "git diff --color-moved-ws" updates.

• Custom userformat "log --format" learned %S atom that stands for the tip the traversal reached the commit from, i.e. --source.

• "git instaweb" learned to drive http.server that comes with "batteries included" Python installation (both Python2 & 3).

• A new encoding UTF-16LE-BOM has been invented to force encoding to UTF-16 with BOM in little endian byte order, which cannot be directly generated by using iconv.

• A new date format "--date=human" that morphs its output depending on how far the time is from the current time has been introduced. "--date=auto:human" can be used to use this new format (or any existing format) when the output is going to the pager or to the terminal, and otherwise the default format.

Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.

• Code clean-up with optimization for the codepath that checks (non-)existence of loose objects.

• More codepaths have become aware of working with in-core repository instances other than the default "the_repository".

• The "strncat()" function is now among the banned functions.

• Portability updates for the HPE NonStop platform.

• Earlier we added "-Wformat-security" to developer builds, assuming that "-Wall" (which includes "-Wformat" which in turn is required to use "-Wformat-security") is always in effect. This is not true when config.mak.autogen is in use, unfortunately. This has been fixed by unconditionally adding "-Wall" to developer builds.

• The loose object cache used to optimize existence look-up has been updated.

• Flaky tests can now be repeatedly run under load with the "--stress" option.

• Documentation/Makefile is getting prepared for manpage localization.

• "git fetch-pack" now can talk the version 2 protocol.

• sha-256 hash has been added and plumbed through the code to allow building Git with the "NewHash".

• Debugging help for http transport.

• "git fetch --deepen=<more>" has been corrected to work over v2 protocol.

• The code to walk tree objects has been taught that we may be working with object names that are not computed with SHA-1.

• The in-core repository instances are passed through more codepaths.

• Update the protocol message specification to allow only the limited use of scaled quantities. This is to ensure potential compatibility issues will not get out of hand.

• Micro-optimize the code that prepares commit objects to be walked by "git rev-list" when the commit-graph is available.

• "git fetch" and "git upload-pack" learned to send all exchanges over the sideband channel while talking the v2 protocol.

• The codepath to write out commit-graph has been optimized by following the usual pattern of visiting objects in in-pack order.

• The codepath to show progress meter while writing out commit-graph file has been improved.

• Cocci rules have been updated to encourage use of strbuf_addbuf().

• "git rebase --merge" has been reimplemented by reusing the internal machinery used for "git rebase -i".

• More code in "git bisect" has been rewritten in C.

• Instead of going through "git-rebase--am" scriptlet to use the "am" backend, the built-in version of "git rebase" learned to drive the "am" backend directly.

• The assumption to work on the single "in-core index" instance has been reduced from the library-ish part of the codebase.

• The test lint learned to catch non-portable "sed" options.

• "git pack-objects" learned another algorithm to compute the set of objects to send, that trades the resulting packfile off to save traversal cost to favor small pushes.

• The travis CI scripts have been corrected to build Git with the compiler(s) of our choice.

• "git submodule update" learned to abort early when core.worktree for the submodule is not set correctly to prevent spreading damage.

• Test suite has been adjusted to run on Azure Pipeline.

• Running "Documentation/doc-diff x" from anywhere other than the top-level of the working tree did not show the usage string correctly, which has been fixed.

• Use of the sparse tool got easier to customize from the command line to help developers.

• A new target "coverage-prove" to run the coverage test under "prove" has been added.

• A flakey "p4" test has been removed.

• The code and tests assume that the system supplied iconv() would always use BOM in its output when asked to encode to UTF-16 (or UTF-32), but apparently some implementations output big-endian without BOM. A compile-time knob has been added to help such systems (e.g. NonStop) to add BOM to the output to increase portability.

[Bruce Dubbs]

Fixed at revision 21278.

[Bruce Dubbs]

Milestone renamed