2.9.4

Git v2.9.4 Release Notes ========================

Fixes since v2.9.3 ------------------

• There are certain house-keeping tasks that need to be performed at the very beginning of any Git program, and programs that are not built-in commands had to do them exactly the same way as "git" potty does. It was easy to make mistakes in one-off standalone programs (like test helpers). A common "main()" function that calls cmd_main() of individual program has been introduced to make it harder to make mistakes.

• "git merge" with renormalization did not work well with merge-recursive, due to "safer crlf" conversion kicking in when it shouldn’t.

• The reflog output format is documented better, and a new format --date=unix to report the seconds-since-epoch (without timezone) has been added.

• "git push --force-with-lease" already had enough logic to allow ensuring that such a push results in creation of a ref (i.e. the receiving end did not have another push from sideways that would be discarded by our force-pushing), but didn’t expose this possibility to the users. It does so now.

• "import-tars" fast-import script (in contrib/) used to ignore a hardlink target and replaced it with an empty file, which has been corrected to record the same blob as the other file the hardlink is shared with.

• "git mv dir non-existing-dir/" did not work in some environments the same way as existing mainstream platforms. The code now moves "dir" to "non-existing-dir", without relying on rename("A", "B/") that strips the trailing slash of ’/’.

• The "t/" hierarchy is prone to get an unusual pathname; "make test" has been taught to make sure they do not contain paths that cannot be checked out on Windows (and the mechanism can be reusable to catch pathnames that are not portable to other platforms as need arises).

• When "git merge-recursive" works on history with many criss-cross merges in "verbose" mode, the names the command assigns to the virtual merge bases could have overwritten each other by unintended reuse of the same piece of memory.

• "git checkout --detach <branch>" used to give the same advice message as that is issued when "git checkout <tag>" (or anything that is not a branch name) is given, but asking with "--detach" is an explicit enough sign that the user knows what is going on. The advice message has been squelched in this case.

• "git difftool" by default ignores the error exit from the backend commands it spawns, because often they signal that they found differences by exiting with a non-zero status code just like "diff" does; the exit status codes 126 and above however are special in that they are used to signal that the command is not executable, does not exist, or killed by a signal. "git difftool" has been taught to notice these exit status codes.

• On Windows, help.browser configuration variable used to be ignored, which has been corrected.

• The "git -c var[=val] cmd" facility to append a configuration variable definition at the end of the search order was described in git(1) manual page, but not in git-config(1), which was more likely place for people to look for when they ask "can I make a one-shot override, and if so how?"

• The tempfile (hence its user lockfile) API lets the caller to open a file descriptor to a temporary file, write into it and then finalize it by first closing the filehandle and then either removing or renaming the temporary file. When the process spawns a subprocess after obtaining the file descriptor, and if the subprocess has not exited when the attempt to remove or rename is made, the last step fails on Windows, because the subprocess has the file descriptor still open. Open tempfile with O_CLOEXEC flag to avoid this (on Windows, this is mapped to O_NOINHERIT).

• "git-shell" rejects a request to serve a repository whose name begins with a dash, which makes it no longer possible to get it confused into spawning service programs like "git-upload-pack" with an option like "--help", which in turn would spawn an interactive pager, instead of working with the repository user asked to access (i.e. the one whose name is "--help").

Also contains minor documentation updates and code clean-ups.