Git - v2.38.0

UI, Workflows & Features

• "git remote show [-n] frotz" now pays attention to negative
  pathspec.

• "git push" sometimes performs poorly when reachability bitmaps are
  used, even in a repository where other operations are helped by
  bitmaps. The push.useBitmaps configuration variable is introduced
  to allow disabling use of reachability bitmaps only for "git push".

• "git grep -m" is a way to limit the hits shown per file.

• "git merge-tree" learned a new mode where it takes two commits and
  computes a tree that would result in the merge commit, if the
  histories leading to these two commits were to be merged.

• "git mv A B" in a sparsely populated working tree can be asked to
  move a path between directories that are "in cone" (i.e. expected
  to be materialized in the working tree) and "out of cone"
  (i.e. expected to be hidden). The handling of such cases has been
  improved.

• Earlier, HTTP transport clients learned to tell the server side
  what locale they are in by sending Accept-Language HTTP header, but
  this was done only for some requests but not others.

• Introduce a safe.barerepository configuration variable that
  allows users to forbid discovery of bare repositories.

• Various messages that come from the pack-bitmap codepaths have been
  tweaked.

• "git rebase -i" learns to update branches whose tip appear in the
  rebased range with "--update-refs" option.

• "git ls-files" learns the "--format" option to tweak its output.

• "git cat-file" learned an option to use the mailmap when showing
  commit and tag objects.

• When "git merge" finds that it cannot perform a merge, it should
  restore the working tree to the state before the command was
  initiated, but in some corner cases it didn't.

• Operating modes like "--batch" of "git cat-file" command learned to
  take NUL-terminated input, instead of one-item-per-line.

• "git rm" has become more aware of the sparse-index feature.

• "git rev-list --disk-usage" learned to take an optional value
  "human" to show the reported value in human-readable format, like
  "3.40MiB".

• The "diagnose" feature to create a zip archive for diagnostic
  material has been lifted from "scalar" and made into a feature of
  "git bugreport".

• The namespaces used by "log --decorate" from "refs/" hierarchy by
  default has been tightened.

• "git rev-list --ancestry-path=C A..B" is a natural extension of
  "git rev-list A..B"; instead of choosing a subset of A..B to those
  that have ancestry relationship with A, it lets a subset with
  ancestry relationship with C.

• "scalar" now enables built-in fsmonitor on enlisted repositories,
  when able.

• The bash prompt (in contrib/) learned to optionally indicate when
  the index is unmerged.

• "git clone" command learned the "--bundle-uri" option to coordinate
  with hosting sites the use of pre-prepared bundle files.

• "git range-diff" learned to honor pathspec argument if given.

• "git format-patch --from=" can be told to add an in-body
  "From:" line even for commits that are authored by the given
  with "--force-in-body-from" option.

• The built-in fsmonitor refuses to work on a network mounted
  repositories; a configuration knob for users to override this has
  been introduced.

• The "scalar" addition from Microsoft is now part of the core Git
  installation.

Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.

• Collection of what is referenced by objects in promisor packs have
  been optimized to inspect these objects in the in-pack order.

• Introduce a helper to see if a branch is already being worked on
  (hence should not be newly checked out in a working tree), which
  performs much better than the existing find_shared_symref() to
  replace many uses of the latter.

• Teach "git archive" to (optionally and then by default) avoid
  spawning an external "gzip" process when creating ".tar.gz" (and
  ".tgz") archives.

• Allow large objects read from a packstream to be streamed into a
  loose object file straight, without having to keep it in-core as a
  whole.

• Further preparation to turn git-submodule.sh into a builtin
  continues.

• Apply Coccinelle rule to turn raw memmove() into MOVE_ARRAY() cpp
  macro, which would improve maintainability and readability.

• Teach "make all" to build gitweb as well.

• Tweak tests so that they still work when the "git init" template
  did not create .git/info directory.

• Add Coccinelle rules to detect the pattern of initializing and then
  finalizing a structure without using it in between at all, which
  happens after code restructuring and the compilers fail to
  recognize as an unused variable.

• The code to convert between GPG trust level strings and internal
  constants we use to represent them have been cleaned up.

• Support for libnettle as SHA256 implementation has been added.

• The way "git multi-pack" uses parse-options API has been improved.

• A Coccinelle rule (in contrib/) to encourage use of COPY_ARRAY
  macro has been improved.

• API tweak to make it easier to run fuzz testing on commit-graph parser.

• Omit fsync-related trace2 entries when their values are all zero.

• The codepath to write multi-pack index has been taught to release a
  large chunk of memory that holds an array of objects in the packs,
  as soon as it is done with the array, to reduce memory consumption.

• Add a level of redirection to array allocation API in xdiff part,
  to make it easier to share with the libgit2 project.

• "git fetch" client logs the partial clone filter used in the trace2
  output.

• The "bundle URI" design gets documented.

• The common ancestor negotiation exchange during a "git fetch"
  session now leaves trace log.

• Test portability improvements.
  (merge 4d1d843be7 mt/rot13-in-c later to maint).

• The "subcommand" mode is introduced to parse-options API and update
  the command line parser of Git commands with subcommands.

• The pack bitmap file gained a bitmap-lookup table to speed up
  locating the necessary bitmap for a given commit.

• The assembly version of SHA-1 implementation for PPC has been
  removed.

• The server side that responds to "git fetch" and "git clone"
  request has been optimized by allowing it to send objects in its
  object store without recomputing and validating the object names.

• Annotate function parameters that are not used (but cannot be
  removed for structural reasons), to prepare us to later compile
  with -Wunused warning turned on.

• Share the text used to explain configuration variables used by "git
  " in "git help " with the text from "git help config".

• "git mv A B" in a sparsely populated working tree can be asked to
  move a path from a directory that is "in cone" to another directory
  that is "out of cone". Handling of such a case has been improved.

• The chainlint script for our tests has been revamped.

Fixes since v2.37

• Rewrite of "git add -i" in C that appeared in Git 2.25 didn't
  correctly record a removed file to the index, which was fixed.

• Certain diff options are currently ignored when combined-diff is
  shown; mark them as incompatible with the feature.

• Adjust technical/bitmap-format to be formatted by AsciiDoc, and
  add some missing information to the documentation.

• Fixes for tests when the source directory has unusual characters in
  its path, e.g. whitespaces, double-quotes, etc.

• "git mktree --missing" lazily fetched objects that are missing from
  the local object store, which was totally unnecessary for the purpose
  of creating the tree object(s) from its input.

• Give _() markings to fatal/warning/usage: labels that are shown in
  front of these messages.

• References to commands-to-be-typed-literally in "git rebase"
  documentation mark-up have been corrected.

• In a non-bare repository, the behavior of Git when the
  core.worktree configuration variable points at a directory that has
  a repository as its subdirectory, regressed in Git 2.27 days.

• Recent update to vimdiff layout code has been made more robust
  against different end-user vim settings.

• Plug various memory leaks, both in the main code and in test-tool
  commands.

• Fixes a long-standing corner case bug around directory renames in
  the merge-ort strategy.

• The resolve-undo information in the index was not protected against
  GC, which has been corrected.

• A corner case bug where lazily fetching objects from a promisor
  remote resulted in infinite recursion has been corrected.

• "git clone" from a repository with some ref whose HEAD is unborn
  did not set the HEAD in the resulting repository correctly, which
  has been corrected.

• An earlier attempt to plug leaks placed a clean-up label to jump to
  at a bogus place, which as been corrected.

• Variable quoting fix in the vimdiff driver of "git mergetool"

• "git shortlog -n" relied on the underlying qsort() to be stable,
  which shouldn't have. Fixed.

• A fix for a regression in test framework.

• mkstemp() emulation on Windows has been improved.

• Add missing documentation for "include" and "includeIf" features in
  "git config" file format, which incidentally teaches the command
  line completion to include them in its offerings.

• Avoid "white/black-list" in documentation and code comments.

• Workaround for a compiler warning against use of die() in
  osx-keychain (in contrib/).

• Workaround for a false positive compiler warning.

• "git p4" working on UTF-16 files on Windows did not implement
  CRLF-to-LF conversion correctly, which has been corrected.

• "git p4" did not handle non-ASCII client name well, which has been
  corrected.

• "rerere-train" script (in contrib/) used to honor commit.gpgSign
  while recreating the throw-away merges.

• "git checkout" miscounted the paths it updated, which has been
  corrected.

• Fix for a bug that makes write-tree to fail to write out a
  non-existent index as a tree, introduced in 2.37.

• There was a bug in the codepath to upgrade generation information
  in commit-graph from v1 to v2 format, which has been corrected.

• Gitweb had legacy URL shortener that is specific to the way
  projects hosted on kernel.org used to (but no longer) work, which
  has been removed.

• Fix build procedure for Windows that uses CMake so that it can pick
  up the shell interpreter from local installation location.

• Conditionally allow building Python interpreter on Windows

• Fix to lstat() emulation on Windows.

• Older gcc with -Wall complains about the universal zero initializer
  "struct s = { 0 };" idiom, which makes developers' lives
  inconvenient (as -Werror is enabled by DEVELOPER=YesPlease). The
  build procedure has been tweaked to help these compilers.

• Plug memory leaks in the failure code path in the "merge-ort" merge
  strategy backend.

• "git symbolic-ref symref non..sen..se" is now diagnosed as an error.

• A follow-up fix to a fix for a regression in 2.36 around hooks.

• Avoid repeatedly running getconf to ask libc version in the test
  suite, and instead just as it once per script.

• Platform-specific code that determines if a directory is OK to use
  as a repository has been taught to report more details, especially
  on Windows.

• "vimdiff3" regression fix.

• "git fsck" reads mode from tree objects but canonicalizes the mode
  before passing it to the logic to check object sanity, which has
  hid broken tree objects from the checking logic. This has been
  corrected, but to help existing projects with broken tree objects
  that they cannot fix retroactively, the severity of anomalies this
  code detects has been demoted to "info" for now.

• Fixes to sparse index compatibility work for "reset" and "checkout"
  commands.

• An earlier optimization discarded a tree-object buffer that is
  still in use, which has been corrected.

• Fix deadlocks between main Git process and subprocess spawned via
  the pipe_command() API, that can kill "git add -p" that was
  reimplemented in C recently.

• The sequencer machinery translated messages left in the reflog by
  mistake, which has been corrected.

• xcalloc(), imitating calloc(), takes "number of elements of the
  array", and "size of a single element", in this order. A call that
  does not follow this ordering has been corrected.

• The preload-index codepath made copies of pathspec to give to
  multiple threads, which were left leaked.

• Update the version of Ubuntu used for GitHub Actions CI from 18.04
  to 22.04.

• The auto-stashed local changes created by "git merge --autostash"
  was mixed into a conflicted state left in the working tree, which
  has been corrected.

• Multi-pack index got corrupted when preferred pack changed from one
  pack to another in a certain way, which has been corrected.
  (merge 99e4d084ff tb/midx-with-changing-preferred-pack-fix later to maint).

• The clean-up of temporary files created via mks_tempfile_dt() was
  racy and attempted to unlink() the leading directory when signals
  are involved, which has been corrected.
  (merge babe2e0559 rs/tempfile-cleanup-race-fix later to maint).

• FreeBSD portability fix for "git maintenance" that spawns "crontab"
  to schedule tasks.
  (merge ee69e7884e bc/gc-crontab-fix later to maint).

• Those who use diff-so-fancy as the diff-filter noticed a regression
  or two in the code that parses the diff output in the built-in
  version of "add -p", which has been corrected.
  (merge 0a101676e5 js/add-p-diff-parsing-fix later to maint).

• Segfault fix-up to an earlier fix to the topic to teach "git reset"
  and "git checkout" work better in a sparse checkout.
  (merge 037f8ea6d9 vd/sparse-reset-checkout-fixes later to maint).

• "git diff --no-index A B" managed its the pathnames of its two
  input files rather haphazardly, sometimes leaking them. The
  command line argument processing has been straightened out to clean
  it up.
  (merge 2b43dd0eb5 rs/diff-no-index-cleanup later to maint).

• "git rev-list --verify-objects" ought to inspect the contents of
  objects and notice corrupted ones, but it didn't when the commit
  graph is in use, which has been corrected.
  (merge b27ccae34b jk/rev-list-verify-objects-fix later to maint).

• More fixes to "add -p"
  (merge 64ec8efb83 js/builtin-add-p-portability-fix later to maint).

• The parser in the script interface to parse-options in "git
  rev-parse" has been updated to diagnose a bogus input correctly.
  (merge f20b9c36d0 ow/rev-parse-parseopt-fix later to maint).

• The code that manages list-object-filter structure, used in partial
  clones, leaked the instances, which has been plugged.
  (merge 66eede4a37 jk/plug-list-object-filter-leaks later to maint).

• Fix another UI regression in the reimplemented "add -p".
  (merge f6f0ee247f rs/add-p-worktree-mode-prompt-fix later to maint).

• "git fetch" over protocol v2 sent an incorrect ref prefix request
  to the server and made "git pull" with configured fetch refspec
  that does not cover the remote branch to merge with fail, which has
  been corrected.
  (merge 49ca2fba39 jk/proto-v2-ref-prefix-fix later to maint).

• A result from opendir() was leaking in the commit-graph expiration
  codepath, which has been plugged.
  (merge 12f1ae5324 ml/commit-graph-expire-dir-leak-fix later to maint).

• Just like we have coding guidelines, we now have guidelines for
  reviewers.
  (merge e01b851923 vd/doc-reviewing-guidelines later to maint).

• Other code cleanup, docfix, build fix, etc.
  (merge 77b9e85c0f vd/fix-perf-tests later to maint).
  (merge 0682bc43f5 jk/test-crontab-fixes later to maint).
  (merge b46dd1726c cc/doc-trailer-whitespace-rules later to maint).