2.8.0.txt

Git 2.8 Release Notes
=====================

Updates since v2.7
------------------

UI, Workflows & Features

 * "branch --delete" has "branch -d" but "push --delete" does not.
   (merge 38a2559 ps/push-delete-option later to maint).

 * "git blame" learned to produce the progress eye-candy when it takes
   too much time before emitting the first line of the result.

 * "git grep" can now be configured (or told from the command line)
   how many threads to use when searching in the working tree files.

 * Some "git notes" operations, e.g. "git log --notes=<note>", should
   be able to read notes from any tree-ish that is shaped like a notes
   tree, but the notes infrastructure required that the argument must
   be a ref under refs/notes/.  Loosen it to require a valid ref only
   when the operation would update the notes (in which case we must
   have a place to store the updated notes tree, iow, a ref).

 * "git grep" by default does not fall back to its "--no-index"
   behaviour outside a directory under Git's control (otherwise the
   user may by mistake end up running a huge recursive search); with a
   new configuration (set in $HOME/.gitconfig--by definition this
   cannot be set in the config file per project), this safety can be
   disabled.

 * "git pull --rebase" has been extended to allow invoking
   "rebase -i".

 * "git p4" learned to cope with the type of a file getting changed.

 * "git format-patch" learned to notice format.outputDirectory
   configuration variable.  This allows "-o <dir>" option to be
   omitted on the command line if you always use the same directory in
   your workflow.


Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.

 * Add a framework to spawn a group of processes in parallel, and use
   it to run "git fetch --recurse-submodules" in parallel.

 * A slight update to the Makefile to mark "phoney" targets
   as such correctly.

 * In-core storage of the reverse index for .pack files (which lets
   you go from a pack offset to an object name) has been streamlined.

 * d95138e6 (setup: set env $GIT_WORK_TREE when work tree is set, like
   $GIT_DIR, 2015-06-26) attempted to work around a glitch in alias
   handling by overwriting GIT_WORK_TREE environment variable to
   affect subprocesses when set_git_work_tree() gets called, which
   resulted in a rather unpleasant regression to "clone" and "init".
   Try to address the same issue by always restoring the environment
   and respawning the real underlying command when handling alias.

 * The low-level code that is used to create symbolic references has
   been updated to share more code with the code that deals with
   normal references.
   (merge 2859dcd jk/symbolic-ref later to maint).

Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.


Fixes since v2.7
----------------

Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.7 in the maintenance
track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases'
notes for details).

 * An earlier change in 2.5.x-era broke users' hooks and aliases by
   exporting GIT_WORK_TREE to point at the root of the working tree,
   interfering when they tried to use a different working tree without
   setting GIT_WORK_TREE environment themselves.
   (merge df1e6ea nd/stop-setenv-work-tree later to maint).

 * The "exclude_list" structure has the usual "alloc, nr" pair of
   fields to be used by ALLOC_GROW(), but clear_exclude_list() forgot
   to reset 'alloc' to 0 when it cleared 'nr' to discard the managed
   array.
   (merge 2653a8c nd/dir-exclude-cleanup later to maint).

 * Paths that have been told the index about with "add -N" are not
   quite yet in the index, but a few commands behaved as if they
   already are in a harmful way.
   (merge 4d55200 nd/ita-cleanup later to maint).

 * "git send-email" was confused by escaped quotes stored in the alias
   files saved by "mutt", which has been corrected.
   (merge 2c510f2 ew/send-email-mutt-alias-fix later to maint).

 * A few unportable C construct have been spotted by clang compiler
   and have been fixed.
   (merge a0df2e5 jk/clang-pedantic later to maint).

 * The documentation has been updated to hint the connection between
   the '--signoff' option and DCO.
   (merge b2c150d dw/signoff-doc later to maint).

 * "git reflog" incorrectly assumed that all objects that used to be
   at the tip of a ref must be commits, which caused it to segfault.
   (merge aecad37 dk/reflog-walk-with-non-commit later to maint).

 * The ignore mechanism saw a few regressions around untracked file
   listing and sparse checkout selection areas in 2.7.0; the change
   that is responsible for the regression has been reverted.
   (merge 8c72236 nd/exclusion-regression-fix later to maint).

 * Some codepaths used fopen(3) when opening a fixed path in $GIT_DIR
   (e.g. COMMIT_EDITMSG) that is meant to be left after the command is
   done.  This however did not work well if the repository is set to
   be shared with core.sharedRepository and the umask of the previous
   user is tighter.  They have been made to work better by calling
   unlink(2) and retrying after fopen(3) fails with EPERM.
   (merge ea56518 js/fopen-harder later to maint).

 * Asking gitweb for a nonexistent commit left a warning in the server
   log.

   Somebody may want to follow this up with an additional test, perhaps?
   IIRC, we do test that no Perl warnings are given to the server log,
   so this should have been caught if our test coverage were good.
   (merge a9eb90a ho/gitweb-squelch-undef-warning later to maint).

 * "git rebase", unlike all other callers of "gc --auto", did not
   ignore the exit code from "gc --auto".
   (merge 8c24f5b jk/ok-to-fail-gc-auto-in-rebase later to maint).

 * Many codepaths that run "gc --auto" before exiting kept packfiles
   mapped and left the file descriptors to them open, which was not
   friendly to systems that cannot remove files that are open.  They
   now close the packs before doing so.
   (merge d562102 js/close-packs-before-gc later to maint).

 * Other minor clean-ups and documentation updates
   (merge 99487cf ss/user-manual later to maint).
   (merge e914ef0 ew/for-each-ref-doc later to maint).
   (merge 36fc7d8 sg/t6050-failing-editor-test-fix later to maint).
   (merge 60253a6 ss/clone-depth-single-doc later to maint).