Documentation/RelNotes/2.1.0.txt

Git v2.1 Release Notes
======================

Updates since v2.0
------------------

UI, Workflows & Features

 * "git commit --date=<date>" option learned to read from more
   timestamp formats, including "--date=now".

 * "git grep" learned grep.fullname configuration variable to force
   "--full-name" to be default.  This may cause regressions on
   scripted users that do not expect this new behaviour.

 * "git merge" without argument, even when there is an upstream
   defined for the current branch, refused to run until
   merge.defaultToUpstream is set to true.  Flip the default of that
   configuration variable to true.

 * "git mergetool" learned to drive the vimdiff3 backend.

 * mergetool.prompt used to default to 'true', always asking "do you
   really want to run the tool on this path?".  Among the two
   purposes this prompt serves, ignore the use case to confirm that
   the user wants to view particular path with the named tool, and
   redefine the meaning of the prompt only to confirm the choice of
   the tool made by the autodetection (for those who configured the
   tool explicitly, the prompt shown for the latter purpose is
   simply annoying).

   Strictly speaking, this is a backward incompatible change and the
   users need to explicitly set the variable to 'true' if they want
   to resurrect the now-ignored use case.

 * "git svn" learned to cope with malformed timestamps with only one
   digit in the hour part, e.g. 2014-01-07T5:01:02.048176Z, emitted
   by some broken subversion server implementations.


Performance, Internal Implementation, etc.

 * "git diff" that compares 3-or-more trees (e.g. parents and the
   result of a merge) have been optimized.

 * The API to update/delete references are being converted to handle
   updates to multiple references in a transactional way.  As an
   example, "update-ref --stdin [-z]" has been updated to use this
   API.


Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.


Fixes since v2.0
----------------

Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.0 in the maintenance
track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases'
notes for details).

 * "--ignore-space-change" option of "git apply" ignored the spaces
   at the beginning of line too aggressively, which is inconsistent
   with the option of the same name "diff" and "git diff" have.
   (merge 14d3bb4 jc/apply-ignore-whitespace later to maint).

 * "git blame" miscounted number of columns needed to show localized
   timestamps, resulting in jaggy left-side-edge of the source code
   lines in its output.
   (merge dd75553 jx/blame-align-relative-time later to maint).

 * We used to disable threaded "git index-pack" on platforms without
   thread-safe pread(); use a different workaround for such
   platforms to allow threaded "git index-pack".
   (merge 3953949 nd/index-pack-one-fd-per-thread later to maint).

 * "git rerere forget" did not work well when merge.conflictstyle
   was set to a non-default value.
   (merge de3d8bb fc/rerere-conflict-style later to maint).

 * "git status", even though it is a read-only operation, tries to
   update the index with refreshed lstat(2) info to optimize future
   accesses to the working tree opportunistically, but this could
   race with a "read-write" operation that modify the index while it
   is running.  Detect such a race and avoid overwriting the index.
   (merge 426ddee ym/fix-opportunistic-index-update-race later to maint).