git/Documentation/RelNotes/2.1.0.txt

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

Backward compatibility notes
----------------------------

 * The default value we give to the environment variable LESS has been
   changed from "FRSX" to "FRX", losing "S" (chop long lines instead
   of wrapping).  Existing users who prefer not to see line-wrapped
   output may want to set

     $ git config core.pager "less -S"

   to restore the traditional behaviour.  It is expected that people
   find output from the most subcommands easier to read with the new
   default, except for "blame" which tends to produce really long
   lines.  To override the new default only for "git blame", you can
   do this:

     $ git config pager.blame "less -S"

 * A few disused directories in contrib/ have been retired.


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

UI, Workflows & Features

 * Since the very beginning of Git, we gave the LESS environment a
   default value "FRSX" when we spawn "less" as the pager.  "S" (chop
   long lines instead of wrapping) has been removed from this default
   set of options, because it is more or less a personal taste thing,
   as opposed to others that have good justifications (i.e. "R" is
   very much justified because many kinds of output we produce are
   colored and "FX" is justified because output we produce is often
   shorter than a page).

 * The logic and data used to compute the display width needed for
   UTF-8 strings have been updated to match Unicode 6.3 better.

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

 * The `core.commentChar` configuration variable is used to specify a
   custom comment character other than the default "#" to be used in
   the commit log editor.  This can be set to `auto` to attempt to
   choose a different character that does not conflict with what
   already starts a line in the message being edited for cases like
   "git commit --amend".

 * "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 imap-send" learned to ask the credential helper for auth
   material.

 * "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.

 * "git tag" when editing the tag message shows the name of the tag
   being edited as a comment in the editor.


Performance, Internal Implementation, etc.

 * Build procedure for 'subtree' (in contrib/) has been cleaned up.

 * The `core.deltabasecachelimit` used to default to 16 MiB , but this
   proved to be too small, and has been bumped to 96 MiB.

 * "git blame" has been optimized greatly by reorganising the data
   structure that is used to keep track of the work to be done.

 * "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).

 * We used to unconditionally disable the pager in the pager process
   we spawn to feed out output, but that prevented people who want to
   run "less" within "less" from doing so.
   (merge c0459ca je/pager-do-not-recurse later to maint).

 * Tools that read diagnostic output in our standard error stream do
   not want to see terminal control sequence (e.g. erase-to-eol).
   Detect them by checking if the standard error stream is connected
   to a tty.
   (merge 38de156 mn/sideband-no-ansi later to maint).

 * Mishandling of patterns in .gitignore that has trailing SPs quoted
   with backslashes (e.g. ones that end with "\ ") have been
   corrected.
   (merge e61a6c1 pb/trim-trailing-spaces later to maint).

 * "--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).

 * "git blame" assigned the blame to the copy in the working-tree if
   the repository is set to core.autocrlf=input and the file used CRLF
   line endings.
   (merge 4d4813a bc/blame-crlf-test later to maint).

 * "git commit --allow-empty-messag -C $commit" did not work when the
   commit did not have any log message.
   (merge 076cbd6 jk/commit-C-pick-empty later to maint).

 * "git grep -O" to show the lines that hit in the pager did not work
   well with case insensitive search.  We now spawn "less" with its
   "-I" option when it is used as the pager (which is the default).
   (merge f7febbe sk/spawn-less-case-insensitively-from-grep-O-i 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).

 * The error reporting from "git index-pack" has been improved to
   distinguish missing objects from type errors.
   (merge 77583e7 jk/index-pack-report-missing later to maint).

 * "git mailinfo" used to read beyond the end of header string while
   parsing an incoming e-mail message to extract the patch.
   (merge b1a013d rs/mailinfo-header-cmp later to maint).

 * On a case insensitive filesystem, merge-recursive incorrectly
   deleted the file that is to be renamed to a name that is the same
   except for case differences.
   (merge baa37bf dt/merge-recursive-case-insensitive 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 log --exclude=<glob> --all | git shortlog" worked as expected,
   but "git shortlog --exclude=<glob> --all", which is supposed to be
   identical to the above pipeline, was not accepted at the command
   line argument parser level.
   (merge eb07774 jc/shortlog-ref-exclude later to maint).

 * "git show -s" (i.e. show log message only) used to incorrectly emit
   an extra blank line after a merge commit.
   (merge ad2f725 mk/show-s-no-extra-blank-line-for-merges 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).

 * "git update-index --cacheinfo" in 2.0 release crashed on a
   malformed command line.
   (merge c8e1ee4 jc/rev-parse-argh-dashed-multi-words later to maint).

 * The mode to run tests with HTTP server tests disabled was broken.
   (merge afa53fe na/no-http-test-in-the-middle later to maint).