Git 2.13.0

Version: 2.13.0
Date: 2017-05-09
License: GNU General Public License
Source: www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/
Last updated 2017-05-15T00:00:00UTC

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2. User's Manual

Release Notes

Backward compatibility notes.

• Use of an empty string as a pathspec element that is used for everything matches is still warned and Git asks users to use a more explicit . for that instead. The hope is that existing users will not mind this change, and eventually the warning can be turned into a hard error, upgrading the deprecation into removal of this (mis)feature. That is not scheduled to happen in the upcoming release (yet).

• The historical argument order git merge <msg> HEAD <commit>... has been deprecated for quite some time, and is now removed.

• The default location ~/.git-credential-cache/socket for the socket used to communicate with the credential-cache daemon has been moved to ~/.cache/git/credential/socket.

• Git now avoids blindly falling back to .git when the setup sequence said we are not in Git repository. A corner case that happens to work right now may be broken by a call to die(BUG). We’ve tried hard to locate such cases and fixed them, but there might still be cases that need to be addressed—bug reports are greatly appreciated.

Updates since v2.12

UI, Workflows & Features

• git describe and git name-rev have been taught to take more than one refname patterns to restrict the set of refs to base their naming output on, and also learned to take negative patterns to name refs not to be used for naming via their --exclude option.

• Deletion of a branch foo/bar could remove .git/refs/heads/foo once there no longer is any other branch whose name begins with foo/, but we didn’t do so so far. Now we do.

• When git merge detects a path that is renamed in one history while the other history deleted (or modified) it, it now reports both paths to help the user understand what is going on in the two histories being merged.

• The <url> part in http.<url>.<variable> configuration variable can now be spelled with ‘*’ that serves as wildcard. E.g. http.https://*.example.com.proxy can be used to specify the proxy used for https://a.example.com, https://b.example.com, etc., i.e. any host in the example.com domain.

• git tag did not leave useful message when adding a new entry to reflog; this was left unnoticed for a long time because refs/tags/* doesn’t keep reflog by default.

• The negative pathspec feature was somewhat more cumbersome to use than necessary in that its short-hand used ! which needed to be escaped from shells, and it required exclude from what? specified.

• The command line options for ssh invocation needs to be tweaked for some implementations of SSH (e.g. PuTTY plink wants -P <port> while OpenSSH wants -p <port> to specify port to connect to), and the variant was guessed when GIT_SSH environment variable is used to specify it. The logic to guess now applies to the command specified by the newer GIT_SSH_COMMAND and also core.sshcommand configuration variable, and comes with an escape hatch for users to deal with misdetected cases.

• The --git-path, --git-common-dir, and --shared-index-path options of git rev-parse did not produce usable output. They are now updated to show the path to the correct file, relative to where the caller is.

• git diff -W has been taught to handle the case where a new function is added at the end of the file better.

• git update-ref -d and other operations to delete references did not leave any entry in HEAD’s reflog when the reference being deleted was the current branch. This is not a problem in practice because you do not want to delete the branch you are currently on, but caused renaming of the current branch to something else not to be logged in a useful way.

• Cc: on the trailer part does not have to conform to RFC strictly, unlike in the e-mail header. git send-email has been updated to ignore anything after ‘>’ when picking addresses, to allow non-address cruft like ` # stable 4.4` after the address.

• When git submodule init decides that the submodule in the working tree is its upstream, it now gives a warning as it is not a very common setup.

• git stash push takes a pathspec so that the local changes can be stashed away only partially.

• Documentation for git ls-files did not refer to core.quotePath.

• The experimental split index feature has gained a few configuration variables to make it easier to use.

• From a working tree of a repository, a new option of rev-parse lets you ask if the repository is used as a submodule of another project, and where the root level of the working tree of that project (i.e. your superproject) is.

• The pathspec mechanism learned to further limit the paths that match the pattern to those that have specified attributes attached via the gitattributes mechanism.

• Our source code has used the SHA1_HEADER cpp macro after \#include in the C code to switch among the SHA-1 implementations. Instead, list the exact header file names and switch among implementations using \#ifdef BLK\_SHA1/\#include block-sha1/sha1.h/.../\#endif; this helps some IDE tools.

• The start-up sequence of git needs to figure out some configured settings before it finds and set itself up in the location of the repository and was quite messy due to its chicken-and-egg nature. The code has been restructured.

• The command line prompt (in contrib/) learned a new tag style that can be specified with GIT_PS1_DESCRIBE_STYLE, to describe a detached HEAD with git describe --tags.

• The configuration file learned a new includeIf.<condition>.path that includes the contents of the given path only when the condition holds. This allows you to say “include this work-related bit only in the repositories under my ~/work/ directory”.

• Recent update to rebase -i started showing a message that is not a warning with warning: prefix by mistake. This has been fixed.

• Recently we started passing the --push-options through the external remote helper interface; now the smart HTTP remote helper understands what to do with the passed information.

• git describe --dirty dies when it cannot be determined if the state in the working tree matches that of HEAD (e.g. broken repository or broken submodule). The command learned a new option git describe --broken to give $name-broken (where $name is the description of HEAD) in such a case.

• git checkout is taught the --recurse-submodules option.

• Recent enhancement to git stash push command to support pathspec to allow only a subset of working tree changes to be stashed away was found to be too chatty and exposed the internal implementation detail (e.g. when it uses reset to match the index to HEAD before doing other things, output from reset seeped out). These, and other chattyness has been fixed.

• git merge <message> HEAD <commit> syntax that has been deprecated since October 2007 has been removed.

• The refs completion for large number of refs has been sped up, partly by giving up disambiguating ambiguous refs and partly by eliminating most of the shell processing between git for-each-ref and ls-remote and Bash’s completion facility.

• On many keyboards, typing @{ involves holding down SHIFT key and the upstream/push keywords do not appear anywhere else in the syntax, we can safely accept them case insensitively without introducing ambiguity or confusion to solve this.

• git tag/branch/for-each-ref family of commands long allowed to filter the refs by --contains X (show only the refs that are descendants of X), --merged X (show only the refs that are ancestors of X), --no-merged X (show only the refs that are not ancestors of X). One curious omission, --no-contains X (show only the refs that are not descendants of X) has been added to them.

• The default behaviour of git log in an interactive session has been changed to enable --decorate.

• The output from git status --short has been extended to show various kinds of dirtyness in submodules differently; instead of to M for modified, m and ? can be shown to signal changes only to the working tree of the submodule but not the commit that is checked out.

• Allow the http.postbuffer configuration variable to be set to a size that can be expressed in size_t, which can be larger than ulong on some platforms.

• git rebase learns --signoff option.

• The completion script (in contrib/) learned to complete git push --delete b<TAB> to complete branch name to be deleted.

• git worktree add --lock allows to lock a worktree immediately after it’s created. This helps prevent a race between git worktree add; git worktree lock and git worktree prune.

• Completion for git checkout <branch> that auto-creates the branch out of a remote tracking branch can now be disabled, as this completion often gets in the way when completing to checkout an existing local branch that happens to share the same prefix with bunch of remote tracking branches.

Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.

• The code to list branches in git branch has been consolidated with the more generic ref-filter API.

• Resource usage while enumerating refs from alternate object store has been optimized to help receiving end of push that hosts a repository with many forks.

• The gitattributes machinery is being taught to work better in a multi-threaded environment.

• git rebase -i starts using the recently updated sequencer code.

• Code and design clean-up for the refs API.

• The preload-index code has been taught not to bother with the index entries that are paths that are not checked out by sparse checkout.

• Some warning() messages from git clean were updated to show the errno from failed system calls.

• The parse\_config\_key() API function has been cleaned up.

• A test that creates a confusing branch whose name is HEAD has been corrected not to do so.

• The code that parses header fields in the commit object has been updated for (micro)performance and code hygiene.

• An helper function to make it easier to append the result from real_path() to a strbuf has been added.

• Reduce authentication round-trip over HTTP when the server supports just a single authentication method. This also improves the behaviour when Git is misconfigured to enable http.emptyAuth against a server that does not authenticate without a username (i.e. not using Kerberos etc., which makes http.emptyAuth pointless).

• Windows port wants to use OpenSSL’s implementation of SHA-1 routines, so let them.

• The t/perf performance test suite was not prepared to test not so old versions of Git, but now it covers versions of Git that are not so ancient.

• Add 32-bit Linux variant to the set of platforms to be tested with Travis CI.

• git branch --list takes the --abbrev and --no-abbrev options to control the output of the object name in its -v(erbose) output, but a recent update started ignoring them; fix it before the breakage reaches to any released version.

• Picking two versions of Git and running tests to make sure the older one and the newer one interoperate happily has now become possible.

• git tag --contains used to (ab)use the object bits to keep track of the state of object reachability without clearing them after use; this has been cleaned up and made to use the newer commit-slab facility.

• The debug helper used in the test framework learned to run a command under gdb interactively.

• The detect attempt to create collisions variant of SHA-1 implementation by Marc Stevens (CWI) and Dan Shumow (Microsoft) has been integrated and made the default.

• The test framework learned to detect unterminated here documents.

• The name-hash used for detecting paths that are different only in cases (which matter on case insensitive filesystems) has been optimized to take advantage of multi-threading when it makes sense.

• An earlier version of sha1dc/sha1.c that was merged to master compiled incorrectly on Windows, which has been fixed.

• what URL do we want to update this submodule? and are we interested in this submodule? are split into two distinct concepts, and then the way used to express the latter got extended, paving a way to make it easier to manage a project with many submodules and make it possible to later extend use of multiple worktrees for a project with submodules.

• Some debugging output from git describe were marked for l10n, but some weren’t. Mark missing ones for l10n.

• Define a new task in .travis.yml that triggers a test session on Windows run elsewhere.

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

• The submodule specific field in the ref_store structure is replaced with a more generic gitdir that can later be used also when dealing with ref_store that represents the set of refs visible from the other worktrees.

• The string-list API used a custom reallocation strategy that was very inefficient, instead of using the usual ALLOC_GROW() macro, which has been fixed. (merge 950a234cbd jh/string-list-micro-optim later to maint).

• In a 2- and 3-way merge of trees, more than one source trees often end up sharing an identical subtree; optimize by not reading the same tree multiple times in such a case. (merge d12a8cf0af jh/unpack-trees-micro-optim later to maint).

• The index file has a trailing SHA-1 checksum to detect file corruption, and historically we checked it every time the index file is used. Omit the validation during normal use, and instead verify only in git fsck.

• Having a git command on the upstream side of a pipe in a test script will hide the exit status from the command, which may cause us to fail to notice a breakage; rewrite tests in a script to avoid this issue.

• Travis CI learns to run coccicheck.

• git checkout that handles a lot of paths has been optimized by reducing the number of unnecessary checks of paths in the has_dir_name() function.

• The internals of the refs API around the cached refs has been streamlined.

• Output from perf tests have been updated to align their titles.

Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.

Fixes since v2.12

Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.12 in the maintenance track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases’ notes for details).

• git repack --depth=<n> for a long time busted the specified depth when reusing delta from existing packs. This has been corrected.

• The code to parse the command line git grep <patterns>... <rev> [[--] <pathspec>...] has been cleaned up, and a handful of bugs have been fixed (e.g. we used to check -- if it is a rev).

• git ls-remote and git archive --remote are designed to work without being in a directory under Git’s control. However, recent updates revealed that we randomly look into a directory called .git/ without actually doing necessary set-up when working in a repository. Stop doing so.

• git show-branch expected there were only very short branch names in the repository and used a fixed-length buffer to hold them without checking for overflow.

• A caller of tempfile API that uses stdio interface to write to files may ignore errors while writing, which is detected when tempfile is closed (with a call to ferror()). By that time, the original errno that may have told us what went wrong is likely to be long gone and was overwritten by an irrelevant value. close_tempfile() now resets errno to EIO to make errno at least predictable.

• git remote rm X, when a branch has remote X configured as the value of its branch..remote, tried to remove branch..remote and branch.*.merge and failed if either is unset.

• A gc.log file left by a backgrounded gc --auto disables further automatic gc; it has been taught to run at least once a day (by default) by ignoring a stale gc.log file that is too old.

• The code to parse git -c VAR=VAL cmd and set configuration variable for the duration of cmd had two small bugs, which have been fixed.

• user.email that consists of only cruft chars should consistently error out, but didn’t.

• git upload-pack, which is a counter-part of git fetch, did not report a request for a ref that was not advertised as invalid. This is generally not a problem (because git fetch will stop before making such a request), but is the right thing to do.

• A leak in a codepath to read from a packed object in (rare) cases has been plugged.

• When a redirected http transport gets an error during the redirected request, we ignored the error we got from the server, and ended up giving a not-so-useful error message.

• The patch subcommand of git add -i was meant to have paths selection prompt just like other subcommand, unlike git add -p directly jumps to hunk selection. Recently, this was broken and add -i lost the paths selection dialog, but it now has been fixed.

• Git v2.12 was shipped with an embarrassing breakage where various operations that verify paths given from the user stopped dying when seeing an issue, and instead later triggering segfault.

• There is no need for Python only to give a few messages to the standard error stream, but we somehow did.

• The code to parse git log -L... command line was buggy when there are many ranges specified with -L; overrun of the allocated buffer has been fixed.

• The command-line parsing of git log -L copied internal data structures using incorrect size on ILP32 systems.

• git diff --quiet relies on the size field in diff_filespec to be correctly populated, but diff_populate_filespec() helper function made an incorrect short-cut when asked only to populate the size field for paths that need to go through convert_to_git() (e.g. CRLF conversion).

• A few tests were run conditionally under (rare) conditions where they cannot be run (like running cvs tests under root account).

• git branch @ created refs/heads/@ as a branch, and in general the disambiguating.

• git fetch that requests a commit by object name, when the other side does not allow such an request, failed without much explanation.

• git filter-branch --prune-empty drops a single-parent commit that becomes a no-op, but did not drop a root commit whose tree is empty.

• Recent versions of Git treats http alternates (used in dumb http transport) just like HTTP redirects and requires the client to enable following it, due to security concerns. But we forgot to give a warning when we decide not to honor the alternates.

• git push had a handful of codepaths that could lead to a deadlock when unexpected error happened, which has been fixed.

• Dumb http transport used to misparse a nonsense http-alternates response, which has been fixed.

• git add -p <pathspec> unnecessarily expanded the pathspec to a list of individual files that matches the pathspec by running git ls-files <pathspec>, before feeding it to git diff-index to see which paths have changes, because historically the pathspec language supported by diff-index was weaker. These days they are equivalent and there is no reason to internally expand it. This helps both performance and avoids command line argument limit on some platforms. (merge 7288e12cce jk/add-i-use-pathspecs later to maint).

• git status --porcelain is supposed to give a stable output, but a few strings were left as translatable by mistake.

• git revert -m 0 $merge\_commit complained that reverting a merge needs to say relative to which parent the reversion needs to happen, as if -m 0 weren’t given. The correct diagnosis is that -m 0 does not refer to the first parent (-m 1 does). This has been fixed.

• Code to read submodule.<name>.ignore config did not state the variable name correctly when giving an error message diagnosing misconfiguration.

• Fix for NO_PTHREADS build.

• Fix for potential segv introduced in v2.11.0 and later (also v2.10.2) to git log --pickaxe-regex -S.

• A few unterminated here documents in tests were fixed, which in turn revealed incorrect expectations the tests make. These tests have been updated.

• Fix for NO_PTHREADS option. (merge 2225e1ea20 bw/grep-recurse-submodules later to maint).

• Git now avoids blindly falling back to .git when the setup sequence said we are not in Git repository. A corner case that happens to work right now may be broken by a call to die(BUG). (merge b1ef400eec jk/no-looking-at-dotgit-outside-repo-final later to maint).

• A few commands that recently learned the --recurse-submodule option misbehaved when started from a subdirectory of the superproject. (merge b2dfeb7c00 bw/recurse-submodules-relative-fix later to maint).

• FreeBSD implementation of getcwd(3) behaved differently when an intermediate directory is unreadable/unsearchable depending on the length of the buffer provided, which our strbuf_getcwd() was not aware of. strbuf_getcwd() has been taught to cope with it better. (merge a54e938e5b rs/freebsd-getcwd-workaround later to maint).

• A recent update to rebase -i stopped running hooks for the git commit command during reword action, which has been fixed.

• Removing an entry from a notes tree and then looking another note entry from the resulting tree using the internal notes API functions did not work as expected. No in-tree users of the API has such access pattern, but it still is worth fixing.

• git receive-pack could have been forced to die by attempting allocate an unreasonably large amount of memory with a crafted push certificate; this has been fixed. (merge f2214dede9 bc/push-cert-receive-fix later to maint).

• Update error handling for codepath that deals with corrupt loose objects. (merge 51054177b3 jk/loose-object-info-report-error later to maint).

• git diff --submodule=diff learned to work better in a project with a submodule that in turn has its own submodules. (merge 17b254cda6 sb/show-diff-for-submodule-in-diff-fix later to maint).

• Update the build dependency so that an update to /usr/bin/perl etc. result in recomputation of perl.mak file. (merge c59c4939c2 ab/regen-perl-mak-with-different-perl later to maint).

• git push --recurse-submodules --push-option=<string> learned to propagate the push option recursively down to pushes in submodules.

• If a patch e-mail had its first paragraph after an in-body header indented (even after a blank line after the in-body header line), the indented line was mistook as a continuation of the in-body header. This has been fixed. (merge fd1062e52e lt/mailinfo-in-body-header-continuation later to maint).

• Clean up fallouts from recent tightening of the set-up sequence, where Git barfs when repository information is accessed without first ensuring that it was started in a repository. (merge bccb22cbb1 jk/no-looking-at-dotgit-outside-repo later to maint).

• git p4 used name-rev HEAD when it wants to learn what branch is checked out; it should use symbolic-ref HEAD. (merge eff451101d ld/p4-current-branch-fix later to maint).

• http.proxy set to an empty string is used to disable the usage of proxy. We broke this early last year. (merge ae51d91105 sr/http-proxy-configuration-fix later to maint).

• $GIT_DIR may in some cases be normalized with all symlinks resolved while gitdir path expansion in the pattern does not receive the same treatment, leading to incorrect mismatch. This has been fixed.

• git submodule script does not work well with strange pathnames. Protect it from a path with slashes in them, at least.

• git fetch-pack was not prepared to accept ERR packet that the upload-pack can send with a human-readable error message. It showed the packet contents with ERR prefix, so there was no data loss, but it was redundant to say ERR in an error message. (merge 8e2c7bef03 jt/fetch-pack-error-reporting later to maint).

• ls-files --recurse-submodules did not quite work well in a project with nested submodules.

• gethostname(2) may not NUL terminate the buffer if hostname does not fit; unfortunately there is no easy way to see if our buffer was too small, but at least this will make sure we will not end up using garbage past the end of the buffer. (merge 5781a9a270 dt/xgethostname-nul-termination later to maint).

• A recent update broke git add -p ../foo from a subdirectory.

• While handy, git\_path() is a dangerous function to use as a callsite that uses it safely one day can be broken by changes to other code that calls it. Reduction of its use continues. (merge 16d2676c9e jk/war-on-git-path later to maint).

• The split-index code configuration code used an unsafe git_path() function without copying its result out.

• Many stale HTTP(s) links have been updated in our documentation. (merge 613416f0be jk/update-links-in-docs later to maint).

• git-shell rejects a request to serve a repository whose name begins with a dash, which makes it no longer possible to get it confused into spawning service programs like git-upload-pack with an option like --help, which in turn would spawn an interactive pager, instead of working with the repository user asked to access (i.e. the one whose name is --help).

• Other minor doc, test and build updates and code cleanups. (merge df2a6e38b7 jk/pager-in-use later to maint).
  (merge 75ec4a6cb0 ab/branch-list-doc later to maint).
  (merge 3e5b36c637 sg/skip-prefix-in-prettify-refname later to maint).
  (merge 2c5e2865cc jk/fast-import-cleanup later to maint).
  (merge 4473060bc2 ab/test-readme-updates later to maint).
  (merge 48a96972fd ab/doc-submitting later to maint).
  (merge f5c2bc2b96 jk/make-coccicheck-detect-errors later to maint).
  (merge c105f563d1 cc/untracked later to maint).
  (merge 8668976b53 jc/unused-symbols later to maint).
  (merge fba275dc93 jc/bs-t-is-not-a-tab-for-sed later to maint).
  (merge be6ed145de mm/ls-files-s-doc later to maint).
  (merge 60b091c679 qp/bisect-docfix later to maint).
  (merge 47242cd103 ah/diff-files-ours-theirs-doc later to maint).
  (merge 35ad44cbd8 sb/submodule-rm-absorb later to maint).
  (merge 0301f1fd92 va/i18n-perl-scripts later to maint).
  (merge 733e064d98 vn/revision-shorthand-for-side-branch-log later to maint).
  (merge 85999743e7 tb/doc-eol-normalization later to maint).
  (merge 0747fb49fd jk/loose-object-fsck later to maint).
  (merge d8f4481c4f jk/quarantine-received-objects later to maint).
  (merge 7ba1ceef95 xy/format-patch-base later to maint).
  (merge fa1912c89a rs/misc-cppcheck-fixes later to maint).
  (merge f17d642d3b ab/push-cas-doc-n-test later to maint).
  (merge 61e282425a ss/gitmodules-ignore-doc later to maint).
  (merge 8d3047cd5b ss/submodule-shallow-doc later to maint).
  (merge 1f9e18b772 jk/prio-queue-avoid-swap-with-self later to maint).
  (merge 627fde1025 jk/submodule-init-segv-fix later to maint).
  (merge d395745d81 rg/doc-pull-typofix later to maint).
  (merge 01e60a9a22 rg/doc-submittingpatches-wordfix later to maint).
  (merge 501d3cd7b8 sr/hooks-cwd-doc later to maint).