Documentation/RelNotes/2.5.0.txt

Git 2.5 Release Notes
=====================

Updates since v2.4
------------------

Ports


UI, Workflows & Features

 * "git p4" now detects the filetype (e.g. binary) correctly even when
   the files are opened exclusively.

 * git p4 attempts to better handle branches in Perforce.

 * "git p4" learned "--changes-block-size <n>" to read the changes in
   chunks from Perforce, instead of making one call to "p4 changes"
   that may trigger "too many rows scanned" error from Perforce.

 * "git show-branch --topics HEAD" (with no other arguments) did not
   do anything interesting.  Instead, contrast the given revision
   against all the local branches by default.

 * A replacement for contrib/workdir/git-new-workdir that does not
   rely on symbolic links and make sharing of objects and refs safer
   by making the borrowee and borrowers aware of each other.

 * Tweak the sample "store" backend of the credential helper to honor
   XDG configuration file locations when specified.


Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.

 * "unsigned char [20]" used thoughout the code to represent object
   names are being converted into a semi-opaque "struct object_id".
   This effort is expected to interfere with other topics in flight,
   but hopefully will give us one extra level of abstraction in the
   end, when completed.

 * Catch a programmer mistake to feed a pointer not an array to
   ARRAY_SIZE() macro, by using a couple of GCC extensions.
   (merge 89c855e ep/do-not-feed-a-pointer-to-array-size later to maint).

 * Some error messages in "git config" were emitted without calling
   the usual error() facility.

 * When "add--interactive" splits a hunk into two overlapping hunks
   and then let the user choose only one, it sometimes feeds an
   incorrect patch text to "git apply".  Add tests to demonstrate
   this.

   I have a slight suspicion that this may be $gmane/87202 coming back
   and biting us (I seem to have said "let's run with this and see
   what happens" back then).

 * More line-ending tests.

 * An earlier rewrite to use strbuf_getwholeline() instead of fgets(3)
   to read packed-refs file revealed that the former is unacceptably
   inefficient.

 * Many long-running operations show progress eye-candy, even when
   they are later backgrounded.  Hide the eye-candy when the process
   is sent to the background instead.
   (merge 9a9a41d lm/squelch-bg-progress later to maint).


Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.


Fixes since v2.4
----------------

Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.4 in the maintenance
track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases'
notes for details).

 * Memory usage of "git index-pack" has been trimmed by tens of
   per-cent.
   (merge c6458e6 nd/slim-index-pack-memory-usage later to maint).

 * "git rev-list --objects $old --not --all" to see if everything that
   is reachable from $old is already connected to the existing refs
   was very inefficient.
   (merge b6e8a3b jk/still-interesting later to maint).

 * "hash-object --literally" introduced in v2.2 was not prepared to
   take a really long object type name.
   (merge 1427a7f jc/hash-object later to maint).

 * "git rebase --quiet" was not quite quiet when there is nothing to
   do.
   (merge 22946a9 jk/rebase-quiet-noop later to maint).

 * The completion for "log --decorate=" parameter value was incorrect.
   (merge af16bda sg/complete-decorate-full-not-long later to maint).

 * "filter-branch" corrupted commit log message that ends with an
   incomplete line on platforms with some "sed" implementations that
   munge such a line.  Work it around by avoiding to use "sed".
   (merge df06201 jk/filter-branch-use-of-sed-on-incomplete-line later to maint).

 * "git daemon" fails to build from the source under NO_IPV6
   configuration (regression in 2.4).
   (merge d358f77 jc/daemon-no-ipv6-for-2.4.1 later to maint).

 * Some time ago, "git blame" (incorrectly) lost the convert_to_git()
   call when synthesizing a fake "tip" commit that represents the
   state in the working tree, which broke folks who record the history
   with LF line ending to make their project portabile across
   platforms while terminating lines in their working tree files with
   CRLF for their platform.
   (merge 4bf256d tb/blame-resurrect-convert-to-git later to maint).

 * We avoid setting core.worktree when the repository location is the
   ".git" directory directly at the top level of the working tree, but
   the code misdetected the case in which the working tree is at the
   root level of the filesystem (which arguably is a silly thing to
   do, but still valid).
   (merge 84ccad8 jk/init-core-worktree-at-root later to maint).

 * "git commit --date=now" or anything that relies on approxidate lost
   the daylight-saving-time offset.
   (merge f6e6362 jc/epochtime-wo-tz later to maint).

 * Access to objects in repositories that borrow from another one on a
   slow NFS server unnecessarily got more expensive due to recent code
   becoming more cautious in a naive way not to lose objects to pruning.
   (merge ee1c6c3 jk/prune-mtime later to maint).

 * The codepaths that read .gitignore and .gitattributes files have been
   taught that these files encoded in UTF-8 may have UTF-8 BOM marker at
   the beginning; this makes it in line with what we do for configuration
   files already.
   (merge 27547e5 cn/bom-in-gitignore later to maint).

 * a few helper scripts in the test suite did not report errors
   correcty.
   (merge de248e9 ep/fix-test-lib-functions-report later to maint).

 * The default $HOME/.gitconfig file created upon "git config --global"
   that edits it had incorrectly spelled user.name and user.email
   entries in it.
   (merge 7e11052 oh/fix-config-default-user-name-section later to maint).

 * "git cat-file bl $blob" failed to barf even though there is no
   object type that is "bl".
   (merge b7994af jk/type-from-string-gently later to maint).

 * The usual "git diff" when seeing a file turning into a directory
   showed a patchset to remove the file and create all files in the
   directory, but "git diff --no-index" simply refused to work.  Also,
   when asked to compare a file and a directory, imitate POSIX "diff"
   and compare the file with the file with the same name in the
   directory, instead of refusing to run.
   (merge 0615173 jc/diff-no-index-d-f later to maint).

 * Code cleanups and documentation updates.
   (merge 0269f96 mm/usage-log-l-can-take-regex later to maint).
   (merge 64f2589 nd/t1509-chroot-test later to maint).
   (merge f86a374 sb/test-bitmap-free-at-end later to maint).
   (merge 05bfc7d sb/line-log-plug-pairdiff-leak later to maint).
   (merge 846e5df pt/xdg-config-path later to maint).
   (merge 1154aa4 jc/plug-fmt-merge-msg-leak later to maint).
   (merge 319b678 jk/sha1-file-reduce-useless-warnings later to maint).