git/Documentation/RelNotes/2.6.0.txt

Git 2.6 Release Notes
=====================

Updates since v2.5
------------------

UI, Workflows & Features

 * An asterisk as a substring (as opposed to the entirety) of a path
   component for both side of a refspec, e.g.
   "refs/heads/o*:refs/remotes/heads/i*", is now allowed.

 * New userdiff pattern definition for fountain screenwriting markup
   format has been added.

 * "git log" and friends learned a new "--date=format:..." option to
   format timestamps using system's strftime(3).

 * "git fast-import" learned to respond to the get-mark command via
   its cat-blob-fd interface.

 * "git rebase -i" learned "drop commit-object-name subject" command
   as another way to skip replaying of a commit.

 * A new configuration variable can enable "--follow" automatically
   when "git log" is run with one pathspec argument.

 * "git status" learned to show a more detailed information regarding
   the "rebase -i" session in progress.

 * "git cat-file" learned "--batch-all-objects" option to enumerate all
   available objects in the repository more quickly than "rev-list
   --all --objects" (the output includes unreachable objects, though).

 * "git fsck" learned to ignore errors on a set of known-to-be-bad
   objects, and also allows the warning levels of various kinds of
   non-critical breakages to be tweaked.

 * "git rebase -i"'s list of todo is made configurable.

 * "git send-email" now performs alias-expansion on names that are
   given via --cccmd, etc.

 * An environment variable GIT_REPLACE_REF_BASE tells Git to look into
   refs hierarchy other than refs/replace/ for the object replacement
   data.

 * Allow untracked cache (experimental) to be used when sparse
   checkout (experimental) is also in use.

 * "git pull --rebase" has been taught to pay attention to
   rebase.autostash configuration.


Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.

 * In preparation for allowing different "backends" to store the refs
   in a way different from the traditional "one ref per file in
   $GIT_DIR or in a $GIT_DIR/packed-refs file" filesystem storage,
   direct filesystem access to ref-like things like CHERRY_PICK_HEAD
   from scripts and programs has been reduced.

 * Computation of untracked status indicator by bash prompt
   script (in contrib/) has been optimized.

 * Memory use reduction when commit-slab facility is used to annotate
   sparsely (which is not recommended in the first place).

 * Clean up refs API and make "git clone" less intimate with the
   implementation detail.

 * "git pull" was reimplemented in C.

 * The packet tracing machinery allows to capture an incoming pack
   data to a file for debugging.

 * Move machinery to parse human-readable scaled numbers like 1k, 4M,
   and 2G as an option parameter's value from pack-objects to
   parse-options API, to make it available to other codepaths.

 * "git verify-tag" and "git verify-commit" have been taught to share
   more code, and then learned to optionally show the verification
   message from the underlying GPG implementation.

 * Various enhancements around "git am" reading patches generated by
   foreign SCM have been made.

 * Ref listing by "git branch -l" and "git tag -l" commands has
   started to be rebuilt, based on the for-each-ref machinery.

 * The code to perform multi-tree merges has been taught to repopulate
   the cache-tree upon a successful merge into the index, so that
   subsequent "diff-index --cached" (hence "status") and "write-tree"
   (hence "commit") will go faster.

   The same logic in "git checkout" may now be removed, but that is a
   separate issue.

 * Tests that assume how reflogs are represented on the filesystem too
   much have been corrected.

 * "git am" has been rewritten in "C".


Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.


Fixes since v2.5
----------------

Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.5 in the maintenance
track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases'
notes for details).

 * "git subtree" (in contrib/) depended on "git log" output to be
   stable, which was a no-no.  Apply a workaround to force a
   particular date format.
   (merge e7aac44 da/subtree-date-confusion later to maint).

 * An attempt to delete a ref by pushing into a repositorywhose HEAD
   symbolic reference points at an unborn branch that cannot be
   created due to ref D/F conflict (e.g. refs/heads/a/b exists, HEAD
   points at refs/heads/a) failed.
   (merge b112b14 jx/do-not-crash-receive-pack-wo-head later to maint).

 * The low-level "git send-pack" did not honor 'user.signingkey'
   configuration variable when sending a signed-push.
   (merge d830d39 db/send-pack-user-signingkey later to maint).

 * "sparse checkout" misbehaved for a path that is excluded from the
   checkout when switching between branches that differ at the path.
   (merge 7d78241 as/sparse-checkout-removal later to maint).

 * An experimental "untracked cache" feature used uname(2) in a
   slightly unportable way.
   (merge 100e433 cb/uname-in-untracked later to maint).

 * A "rebase" replays changes of the local branch on top of something
   else, as such they are placed in stage #3 and referred to as
   "theirs", while the changes in the new base, typically a foreign
   work, are placed in stage #2 and referred to as "ours".  Clarify
   the "checkout --ours/--theirs".
   (merge f303016 se/doc-checkout-ours-theirs later to maint).

 * The "rev-parse --parseopt" mode parsed the option specification
   and the argument hint in a strange way to allow '=' and other
   special characters in the option name while forbidding them from
   the argument hint.  This made it impossible to define an option
   like "--pair <key>=<value>" with "pair=key=value" specification,
   which instead would have defined a "--pair=key <value>" option.
   (merge 2d893df ib/scripted-parse-opt-better-hint-string later to maint).

 * Often a fast-import stream builds a new commit on top of the
   previous commit it built, and it often unconditionally emits a
   "from" command to specify the first parent, which can be omitted in
   such a case.  This caused fast-import to forget the tree of the
   previous commit and then re-read it from scratch, which was
   inefficient.  Optimize for this common case.
   (merge 0df3245 mh/fast-import-optimize-current-from later to maint).

 * Running an aliased command from a subdirectory when the .git thing
   in the working tree is a gitfile pointing elsewhere did not work.
   (merge d95138e nd/export-worktree later to maint).

 * "Is this subdirectory a separate repository that should not be
   touched?" check "git clean" was inefficient.  This was replaced
   with a more optimized check.
   (merge 38ae878 ee/clean-remove-dirs later to maint).

 * The "new-worktree-mode" hack in "checkout" that was added in
   nd/multiple-work-trees topic has been removed by updating the
   implementation of new "worktree add".
   (merge 65f9b75 es/worktree-add-cleanup later to maint).

 * Remove remaining cruft from  "git checkout --to", which
   transitioned to "git worktree add".
   (merge 114ff88 es/worktree-add later to maint).

 * An off-by-one error made "git remote" to mishandle a remote with a
   single letter nickname.
   (merge bc598c3 mh/get-remote-group-fix later to maint).

 * Code cleanups and documentation updates.
   (merge 1c601af es/doc-clean-outdated-tools later to maint).
   (merge 3581304 kn/tag-doc-fix later to maint).
   (merge 3a59e59 kb/i18n-doc later to maint).
   (merge 45abdee sb/remove-unused-var-from-builtin-add later to maint).
   (merge 14691e3 sb/parse-options-codeformat later to maint).
   (merge 4a6ada3 ad/bisect-cleanup later to maint).
   (merge da4c5ad ta/docfix-index-format-tech later to maint).