Git v2.44 Release Notes

=======================

Backward Compatibility Notes

* "git checkout -B <branch>" used to allow switching to a branch that

is in use on another worktree, but this was by mistake. The users

need to use "--ignore-other-worktrees" option.

UI, Workflows & Features

* "git add" and "git stash" learned to support the ":(attr:...)"

magic pathspec.

* "git rebase --autosquash" is now enabled for non-interactive rebase,

but it is still incompatible with the apply backend.

* Introduce "git replay", a tool meant on the server side without

working tree to recreate a history.

* "git merge-file" learned to take the "--diff-algorithm" option to

use algorithm different from the default "myers" diff.

* Command line completion (in contrib/) learned to complete path

arguments to the "add/set" subcommands of "git sparse-checkout"

better.

* "git checkout -B <branch> [<start-point>]" allowed a branch that is

in use in another worktree to be updated and checked out, which

might be a bit unexpected. The rule has been tightened, which is a

breaking change. "--ignore-other-worktrees" option is required to

unbreak you, if you are used to the current behaviour that "-B"

overrides the safety.

* The builtin_objectmode attribute is populated for each path

without adding anything in .gitattributes files, which would be

useful in magic pathspec, e.g., ":(attr:builtin_objectmode=100755)"

to limit to executables.

* "git fetch" learned to pay attention to "fetch.all" configuration

variable, which pretends as if "--all" was passed from the command

line when no remote parameter was given.

* In addition to (rather cryptic) Security Identifiers, show username

and domain in the error message when we barf on mismatch between

the Git directory and the current user on Windows.

* The error message given when "git branch -d branch" fails due to

commits unique to the branch has been split into an error and a new

conditional advice message.

* When given an existing but unreadable file as a configuration file,

gitweb behaved as if the file did not exist at all, but now it

errors out. This is a change that may break backward compatibility.

* When $HOME/.gitconfig is missing but XDG config file is available, we

should write into the latter, not former. "git gc" and "git

maintenance" wrote into a wrong "global config" file, which have

been corrected.

* Define "special ref" as a very narrow set that consists of

FETCH_HEAD and MERGE_HEAD, and clarify everything else that used to

be classified as such are actually just pseudorefs.

* All conditional "advice" messages show how to turn them off, which

becomes repetitive. Setting advice.* configuration explicitly on

now omits the instruction part.

* The "disable repository discovery of a bare repository" check,

triggered by setting safe.bareRepository configuration variable to

'explicit', has been loosened to exclude the ".git/" directory inside

a non-bare repository from the check. So you can do "cd .git &&

git cmd" to run a Git command that works on a bare repository without

explicitly specifying $GIT_DIR now.

* The completion script (in contrib/) learned more options that can

be used with "git log".

* The labels on conflict markers for the common ancestor, our version,

and the other version are available to custom 3-way merge driver

via %S, %X, and %Y placeholders.

* The write codepath for the reftable data learned to honor

core.fsync configuration.

* The "--fsck-objects" option of "git index-pack" now can take the

optional parameter to tweak severity of different fsck errors.

* The wincred credential backend has been taught to support oauth

refresh token the same way as credential-cache and

credential-libsecret backends.

* Command line completion support (in contrib/) has been

updated for "git bisect".

* "git branch" and friends learned to use the formatted text as

sorting key, not the underlying timestamp value, when the --sort

option is used with author or committer timestamp with a format

specifier (e.g., "--sort=creatordate:format:%H:%M:%S").

* The command line completion script (in contrib/) learned to

complete configuration variable names better.

Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.

* Process to add some form of low-level unit tests has started.

* Add support for GitLab CI.

* "git for-each-ref --no-sort" still sorted the refs alphabetically

which paid non-trivial cost. It has been redefined to show output

in an unspecified order, to allow certain optimizations to take

advantage of.

* Simplify API implementation to delete references by eliminating

duplication.

* Subject approxidate() and show_date() machinery to OSS-Fuzz.

* A new helper to let us pretend that we called lstat() when we know

our cache_entry is up-to-date via fsmonitor.

* The optimization based on fsmonitor in the "diff --cached"

codepath is resurrected with the "fake-lstat" introduced earlier.

* Test balloon to use C99 "bool" type from <stdbool.h> has been

added.

* "git clone" has been prepared to allow cloning a repository with

non-default hash function into a repository that uses the reftable

backend.

* Streaming spans of packfile data used to be done only from a

single, primary, pack in a repository with multiple packfiles. It

has been extended to allow reuse from other packfiles, too.

* Comment updates to help developers not to attempt to modify

messages from plumbing commands that must stay constant.

It might make sense to reassess the plumbing needs every few years,

but that should be done as a separate effort.

* Move test-ctype helper to the unit-test framework.

* Instead of manually creating refs/ hierarchy on disk upon a

creation of a secondary worktree, which is only usable via the

files backend, use the refs API to populate it.

* CI for GitLab learned to drive macOS jobs.

* A few tests to "git commit -o <pathspec>" and "git commit -i

<pathspec>" has been added.

* Tests on ref API are moved around to prepare for reftable.

* The Makefile often had to say "-L$(path) -R$(path)" that repeats

the path to the same library directory for link time and runtime.

A Makefile template is used to reduce such repetition.

* The priority queue test has been migrated to the unit testing

framework.

* Setting `feature.experimental` opts the user into multi-pack reuse

experiment

* Squelch node.js 16 deprecation warnings from GitHub Actions CI

by updating actions/github-script and actions/checkout that use

node.js 20.

* The mechanism to report the filename in the source code, used by

the unit-test machinery, assumed that the compiler expanded __FILE__

to the path to the source given to the $(CC), but some compilers

give full path, breaking the output. This has been corrected.

Fixes since v2.43

-----------------

* The way CI testing used "prove" could lead to running the test

suite twice needlessly, which has been corrected.

* Update ref-related tests.

* "git format-patch --encode-email-headers" ignored the option when

preparing the cover letter, which has been corrected.

* Newer versions of Getopt::Long started giving warnings against our

(ab)use of it in "git send-email". Bump the minimum version

requirement for Perl to 5.8.1 (from September 2002) to allow

simplifying our implementation.

* Earlier we stopped relying on commit-graph that (still) records

information about commits that are lost from the object store,

which has negative performance implications. The default has been

flipped to disable this pessimization.

* Stale URLs have been updated to their current counterparts (or

archive.org) and HTTP links are replaced with working HTTPS links.

* trace2 streams used to record the URLs that potentially embed

authentication material, which has been corrected.

* The sample pre-commit hook that tries to catch introduction of new

paths that use potentially non-portable characters did not notice

an existing path getting renamed to such a problematic path, when

rename detection was enabled.

* The command line parser for the "log" family of commands was too

loose when parsing certain numbers, e.g., silently ignoring the

extra 'q' in "git log -n 1q" without complaining, which has been

tightened up.

* "git $cmd --end-of-options --rev -- --path" for some $cmd failed

to interpret "--rev" as a rev, and "--path" as a path. This was

fixed for many programs like "reset" and "checkout".

* "git bisect reset" has been taught to clean up state files and refs

even when BISECT_START file is gone.

* Some codepaths did not correctly parse configuration variables

specified with valueless "true", which has been corrected.

* Code clean-up for sanity checking of command line options for "git

show-ref".

* The code to parse the From e-mail header has been updated to avoid

recursion.

* "git fetch --atomic" issued an unnecessary empty error message,

which has been corrected.

* Command line completion script (in contrib/) learned to work better

with the reftable backend.

* "git status" is taught to show both the branch being bisected and

being rebased when both are in effect at the same time.

* "git archive --list extra garbage" silently ignored excess command

line parameters, which has been corrected.

* "git sparse-checkout set" added default patterns even when the

patterns are being fed from the standard input, which has been

corrected.

* "git sparse-checkout (add|set) --[no-]cone --end-of-options" did

not handle "--end-of-options" correctly after a recent update.

* Unlike other environment variables that took the usual

true/false/yes/no as well as 0/1, GIT_FLUSH only understood 0/1,

which has been corrected.

* Clearing in-core repository (happens during e.g., "git fetch

--recurse-submodules" with commit graph enabled) made in-core

commit object in an inconsistent state by discarding the necessary

data from commit-graph too early, which has been corrected.

* Update to a new feature recently added, "git show-ref --exists".

* oss-fuzz tests are built and run in CI.

(merge c4a9cf1df3 js/oss-fuzz-build-in-ci later to maint).

* Rename detection logic ignored the final line of a file if it is an

incomplete line.

* GitHub CI update.

(merge 0188b2c8e0 pb/ci-github-skip-logs-for-broken-tests later to maint).

* "git diff --no-rename A B" did not disable rename detection but did

not trigger an error from the command line parser.

* "git archive --remote=<remote>" learned to talk over the smart

http (aka stateless) transport.

(merge 176cd68634 jx/remote-archive-over-smart-http later to maint).

* Fetching via protocol v0 over Smart HTTP transport sometimes failed

to correctly auto-follow tags.

(merge fba732c462 jk/fetch-auto-tag-following-fix later to maint).

* The documentation for the --exclude-per-directory option marked it

as deprecated, which confused readers into thinking there may be a

plan to remove it in the future, which was not our intention.

(merge 0009542cab jc/ls-files-doc-update later to maint).

* "git diff --no-index file1 file2" segfaulted while invoking the

external diff driver, which has been corrected.

* Rewrite //-comments to /* comments */ in files whose comments

prevalently use the latter.

* Cirrus CI jobs started breaking because we specified version of

FreeBSD that is no longer available, which has been corrected.

(merge 81fffb66d3 cb/use-freebsd-13-2-at-cirrus-ci later to maint).

* A caller called index_file_exists() that takes a string expressed

as <ptr, length> with a wrong length, which has been corrected.

(merge 156e28b36d jh/sparse-index-expand-to-path-fix later to maint).

* A failed "git tag -s" did not necessarily result in an error

depending on the crypto backend, which has been corrected.

* "git stash" sometimes was silent even when it failed due to

unwritable index file, which has been corrected.

* "git show-ref --verify" did not show things like "CHERRY_PICK_HEAD",

which has been corrected.

* Recent conversion to allow more than 0/1 in GIT_FLUSH broke the

mechanism by flipping what yes/no means by mistake, which has been

corrected.

* The sequencer machinery does not use the ref API and instead

records names of certain objects it needs for its correct operation

in temporary files, which makes these objects susceptible to loss

by garbage collection. These temporary files have been added as

starting points for reachability analysis to fix this.

(merge bc7f5db896 pw/gc-during-rebase later to maint).

* "git cherry-pick" invoked during "git rebase -i" session lost

the authorship information, which has been corrected.

(merge e4301f73ff vn/rebase-with-cherry-pick-authorship later to maint).

* The code paths that call repo_read_object_file() have been

tightened to react to errors.

(merge 568459bf5e js/check-null-from-read-object-file later to maint).

* Other code cleanup, docfix, build fix, etc.

(merge 5aea3955bc rj/clarify-branch-doc-m later to maint).

(merge 9cce3be2df bk/bisect-doc-fix later to maint).

(merge 8430b438f6 vd/fsck-submodule-url-test later to maint).

(merge 3cb4384683 jc/t0091-with-unknown-git later to maint).

(merge 020456cb74 rs/receive-pack-remove-find-header later to maint).

(merge bc47139f4f la/trailer-cleanups later to maint).