git-2.16.0

[bdubbs@…]

New minor version.

[bdubbs@…]

Git 2.16 Release Notes

Backward compatibility notes and other notable changes.

• Use of an empty string as a pathspec element that is used for 'everything matches' is now an error.

Updates since v2.15

UI, Workflows & Features

• An empty string as a pathspec element that means "everything" i.e. 'git add ""', is now illegal. We started this by first deprecating and warning a pathspec that has such an element in 2.11 (Nov 2016).

• A hook script that is set unexecutable is simply ignored. Git notifies when such a file is ignored, unless the message is squelched via advice.ignoredHook configuration.

• "git pull" has been taught to accept "--[no-]signoff" option and pass it down to "git merge".

• The "--push-option=<string>" option to "git push" now defaults to a list of strings configured via push.pushOption variable.

• "gitweb" checks if a directory is searchable with Perl's "-x" operator, which can be enhanced by using "filetest 'access'" pragma, which now we do.

• "git stash save" has been deprecated in favour of "git stash push".

• The set of paths output from "git status --ignored" was tied closely with its "--untracked=<mode>" option, but now it can be controlled more flexibly. Most notably, a directory that is ignored because it is listed to be ignored in the ignore/exclude mechanism can be handled differently from a directory that ends up to be ignored only because all files in it are ignored.

• The remote-helper for talking to MediaWiki has been updated to truncate an overlong pagename so that ".mw" suffix can still be added.

• The remote-helper for talking to MediaWiki has been updated to work with mediawiki namespaces.

• The "--format=..." option "git for-each-ref" takes learned to show the name of the 'remote' repository and the ref at the remote side that is affected for 'upstream' and 'push' via "%(push:remotename)" and friends.
• Doc and message updates to teach users "bisect view" is a synonym for "bisect visualize".

• "git bisect run" that did not specify any command to run used to go ahead and treated all commits to be tested as 'good'. This has been corrected by making the command error out.

• The SubmittingPatches document has been converted to produce an HTML version via AsciiDoc/Asciidoctor.

• We learned to optionally talk to a file system monitor via new fsmonitor extension to speed up "git status" and other operations that need to see which paths have been modified. Currently we only support "watchman". See File System Monitor section of git-update-index(1) for more detail.

• The "diff" family of commands learned to ignore differences in carriage return at the end of line.

• Places that know about "sendemail.to", like documentation and shell completion (in contrib/) have been taught about "sendemail.tocmd", too.

• "git add --renormalize ." is a new and safer way to record the fact that you are correcting the end-of-line convention and other "convert_to_git()" glitches in the in-repository data.

• "git branch" and "git checkout -b" are now forbidden from creating a branch whose name is "HEAD".

• "git branch --list" learned to show its output through the pager by default when the output is going to a terminal, which is controlled by the pager.branch configuration variable. This is similar to a recent change to "git tag --list".

• "git grep -W", "git diff -W" and their friends learned a heuristic to extend a pre-context beyond the line that matches the "function pattern" (aka "diff.*.xfuncname") to include a comment block, if exists, that immediately precedes it.

• "git config --expiry-date gc.reflogexpire" can read "2.weeks" from the configuration and report it as a timestamp, just like "--int" would read "1k" and report 1024, to help consumption by scripts.

• The shell completion (in contrib/) learned that "git pull" can take the "--autostash" option.

• The tagnames "git log --decorate" uses to annotate the commits can now be limited to subset of available refs with the two additional options, --decorate-refs[-exclude]=<pattern>.
• "git grep" compiled with libpcre2 sometimes triggered a segfault, which is being fixed.

• "git send-email" tries to see if the sendmail program is available in /usr/lib and /usr/sbin; extend the list of locations to be checked to also include directories on $PATH.

• "git diff" learned, "--anchored", a variant of the "--patience" algorithm, to which the user can specify which 'unique' line to be used as anchoring points.

• The way "git worktree add" determines what branch to create from where and checkout in the new worktree has been updated a bit.

• Ancient part of codebase still shows dots after an abbreviated object name just to show that it is not a full object name, but these ellipses are confusing to people who newly discovered Git who are used to seeing abbreviated object names and find them confusing with the range syntax.

• With a configuration variable rebase.abbreviateCommands set, "git rebase -i" produces the todo list with a single-letter command names.

• "git worktree add" learned to run the post-checkout hook, just like "git checkout" does, after the initial checkout.

• "git svn" has been updated to strip CRs in the commit messages, as recent versions of Subversion rejects them.

• "git imap-send" did not correctly quote the folder name when making a request to the server, which has been corrected.

• Error messages from "git rebase" have been somewhat cleaned up.

• Git has been taught to support an ​https:// URL used for http.proxy when using recent versions of libcurl.

• "git merge" learned to pay attention to merge.verifySignatures configuration variable and pretend as if '--verify-signatures' option was given from the command line.

• "git describe" was taught to dig trees deeper to find a <commit-ish>:<path> that refers to a given blob object.

Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.

• An earlier update made it possible to use an on-stack in-core lockfile structure (as opposed to having to deliberately leak an on-heap one). Many codepaths have been updated to take advantage of this new facility.

• Calling cmd_foo() as if it is a general purpose helper function is a no-no. Correct two instances of such to set an example.

• We try to see if somebody runs our test suite with a shell that does not support "local" like bash/dash does.

• An early part of piece-by-piece rewrite of "git bisect" in C.

• GSoC to piece-by-piece rewrite "git submodule" in C.

• Optimize the code to find shortest unique prefix of object names.

• Pathspec-limited revision traversal was taught not to keep finding unneeded differences once it knows two trees are different inside given pathspec.

• Conversion from uchar[20] to struct object_id continues.

• Code cleanup.

• A single-word "unsigned flags" in the diff options is being split into a structure with many bitfields.

• TravisCI build updates.

• Parts of a test to drive the long-running content filter interface has been split into its own module, hopefully to eventually become reusable.

• Drop (perhaps overly cautious) sanity check before using the index read from the filesystem at runtime.

• The build procedure has been taught to avoid some unnecessary instability in the build products.

• A new mechanism to upgrade the wire protocol in place is proposed and demonstrated that it works with the older versions of Git without harming them.

• An infrastructure to define what hash function is used in Git is introduced, and an effort to plumb that throughout various codepaths has been started.

• The code to iterate over loose object files got optimized.

• An internal function that was left for backward compatibility has been removed, as there is no remaining callers.

• Historically, the diff machinery for rename detection had a hardcoded limit of 32k paths; this is being lifted to allow users trade cycles with a (possibly) easier to read result.

• The tracing infrastructure has been optimized for cases where no tracing is requested.

• In preparation for implementing narrow/partial clone, the object walking machinery has been taught a way to tell it to "filter" some objects from enumeration.

• A few structures and variables that are implementation details of the decorate API have been renamed and then the API got documented better.

• Assorted updates for TravisCI integration. (merge 4f26366679 sg/travis-fixes later to maint).

• Introduce a helper to simplify code to parse a common pattern that expects either "--key" or "--key=<something>".

• "git version --build-options" learned to report the host CPU and the exact commit object name the binary was built from.

Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.

Fixes since v2.15

• UNC paths are also relevant in Cygwin builds and they are now tested just like Mingw builds.

• Correct start-up sequence so that a repository could be placed immediately under the root directory again (which was broken at around Git 2.13).

• The credential helper for libsecret (in contrib/) has been improved to allow possibly prompting the end user to unlock secrets that are currently locked (otherwise the secrets may not be loaded).

• MinGW updates.

• Error checking in "git imap-send" for empty response has been improved.

• Recent update to the refs infrastructure implementation started rewriting packed-refs file more often than before; this has been optimized again for most trivial cases.

• Some error messages did not quote filenames shown in it, which have been fixed.

• "git rebase -i" recently started misbehaving when a submodule that is configured with 'submodule.<name>.ignore' is dirty; this has been corrected.

• Building with NO_LIBPCRE1_JIT did not disable it, which has been fixed.

• We used to add an empty alternate object database to the system that does not help anything; it has been corrected.

• Doc update around use of "format-patch --subject-prefix" etc.

• A fix for an ancient bug in "git apply --ignore-space-change" codepath.

• Clarify and enhance documentation for "merge-base --fork-point", as it was clear what it computed but not why/what for.

• A few scripts (both in production and tests) incorrectly redirected their error output. These have been corrected.

• "git notes" sent its error message to its standard output stream, which was corrected.

• The three-way merge performed by "git cherry-pick" was confused when a new submodule was added in the meantime, which has been fixed (or "papered over").

• The sequencer machinery (used by "git cherry-pick A..B", and "git rebase -i", among other things) would have lost a commit if stopped due to an unlockable index file, which has been fixed.

• "git apply --inaccurate-eof" when used with "--ignore-space-change" triggered an internal sanity check, which has been fixed.

• Command line completion (in contrib/) has been taught about the "--copy" option of "git branch".

• When "git rebase" prepared a mailbox of changes and fed it to "git am" to replay them, it was confused when a stray "From " happened to be in the log message of one of the replayed changes. This has been corrected.

• There was a recent semantic mismerge in the codepath to write out a section of a configuration section, which has been corrected.

• Mentions of "git-rebase" and "git-am" (dashed form) still remained in end-user visible strings emitted by the "git rebase" command; they have been corrected.

• Contrary to the documentation, "git pull -4/-6 other-args" did not ask the underlying "git fetch" to go over IPv4/IPv6, which has been corrected.

• "git checkout --recursive" may overwrite and rewind the history of the branch that happens to be checked out in submodule repositories, which might not be desirable. Detach the HEAD but still allow the recursive checkout to succeed in such a case. (merge 57f22bf997 sb/submodule-recursive-checkout-detach-head later to maint).

• "git branch --set-upstream" has been deprecated and (sort of) removed, as "--set-upstream-to" is the preferred one these days. The documentation still had "--set-upstream" listed on its synopsis section, which has been corrected. (merge a060f3d3d8 tz/branch-doc-remove-set-upstream later to maint).

• Internally we use 0{40} as a placeholder object name to signal the codepath that there is no such object (e.g. the fast-forward check while "git fetch" stores a new remote-tracking ref says "we know there is no 'old' thing pointed at by the ref, as we are creating it anew" by passing 0{40} for the 'old' side), and expect that a codepath to locate an in-core object to return NULL as a sign that the object does not exist. A look-up for an object that does not exist however is quite costly with a repository with large number of packfiles. This access pattern has been optimized. (merge 87b5e236a1 jk/fewer-pack-rescan later to maint).

• In addition to "git stash -m message", the command learned to accept "git stash -mmessage" form. (merge 5675473fcb ph/stash-save-m-option-fix later to maint).

• @{-N} in "git checkout @{-N}" may refer to a detached HEAD state, but the documentation was not clear about it, which has been fixed. (merge 75ce149575 ks/doc-checkout-previous later to maint).

• A regression in the progress eye-candy was fixed. (merge 9c5951cacf jk/progress-delay-fix later to maint).

• The code internal to the recursive merge strategy was not fully prepared to see a path that is renamed to try overwriting another path that is only different in case on case insensitive systems. This does not matter in the current code, but will start to matter once the rename detection logic starts taking hints from nearby paths moving to some directory and moves a new path along with them. (merge 4cba2b0108 en/merge-recursive-icase-removal later to maint).

• An v2.12-era regression in pathspec match logic, which made it look into submodule tree even when it is not desired, has been fixed. (merge eef3df5a93 bw/pathspec-match-submodule-boundary later to maint).

• Amending commits in git-gui broke the author name that is non-ascii due to incorrect enconding conversion.

• Recent update to the submodule configuration code broke "diff-tree" by accidentally stopping to read from the index upfront. (merge fd66bcc31f bw/submodule-config-cleanup later to maint).

• Git shows a message to tell the user that it is waiting for the user to finish editing when spawning an editor, in case the editor opens to a hidden window or somewhere obscure and the user gets lost. (merge abfb04d0c7 ls/editor-waiting-message later to maint).

• The "safe crlf" check incorrectly triggered for contents that does not use CRLF as line endings, which has been corrected. (merge 649f1f0948 tb/check-crlf-for-safe-crlf later to maint).

• "git clone --shared" to borrow from a (secondary) worktree did not work, even though "git clone --local" did. Both are now accepted. (merge b3b05971c1 es/clone-shared-worktree later to maint).

• The build procedure now allows not just the repositories but also the refs to be used to take pre-formatted manpages and html documents to install. (merge 65289e9dcd rb/quick-install-doc later to maint).

• Update the shell prompt script (in contrib/) to strip trailing CR from strings read from various "state" files. (merge 041fe8fc83 ra/prompt-eread-fix later to maint).

• "git merge -s recursive" did not correctly abort when the index is dirty, if the merged tree happened to be the same as the current HEAD, which has been fixed.

• Bytes with high-bit set were encoded incorrectly and made credential helper fail. (merge 4c267f2ae3 jd/fix-strbuf-add-urlencode-bytes later to maint).
• Update the shell prompt script (in contrib/) to strip trailing CR from strings read from various "state" files. (merge 041fe8fc83 ra/prompt-eread-fix later to maint).

• "git merge -s recursive" did not correctly abort when the index is dirty, if the merged tree happened to be the same as the current HEAD, which has been fixed.

• Bytes with high-bit set were encoded incorrectly and made credential helper fail. (merge 4c267f2ae3 jd/fix-strbuf-add-urlencode-bytes later to maint).

• "git rebase -p -X<option>" did not propagate the option properly down to underlying merge strategy backend. (merge dd6fb0053c js/fix-merge-arg-quoting-in-rebase-p later to maint).

• "git merge -s recursive" did not correctly abort when the index is dirty, if the merged tree happened to be the same as the current HEAD, which has been fixed. (merge f309e8e768 ew/empty-merge-with-dirty-index-maint later to maint).

• Other minor doc, test and build updates and code cleanups.

[bdubbs@…]

Fixed at revision 19680.