Log Message:
Git 2.14 Release Notes
======================

Backward compatibility notes and other notable changes.

 * Use of an empty string as a pathspec element that is used for
   'everything matches' is still warned and Git asks users to use a
   more explicit '.' for that instead.  The hope is that existing
   users will not mind this change, and eventually the warning can be
   turned into a hard error, upgrading the deprecation into removal of
   this (mis)feature.  That is not scheduled to happen in the upcoming
   release (yet).

 * Git now avoids blindly falling back to ".git" when the setup
   sequence said we are _not_ in Git repository.  A corner case that
   happens to work right now may be broken by a call to die("BUG").
   We've tried hard to locate such cases and fixed them, but there
   might still be cases that need to be addressed--bug reports are
   greatly appreciated.

 * The experiment to improve the hunk-boundary selection of textual
   diff output has finished, and the "indent heuristics" has now
   become the default.

 * Git can now be built with PCRE v2 instead of v1 of the PCRE
   library. Replace USE_LIBPCRE=YesPlease with USE_LIBPCRE2=YesPlease
   in existing build scripts to build against the new version.  As the
   upstream PCRE maintainer has abandoned v1 maintenance for all but
   the most critical bug fixes, use of v2 is recommended.

Updates since v2.13
-------------------

UI, Workflows & Features

 * The colors in which "git status --short --branch" showed the names
   of the current branch and its remote-tracking branch are now
   configurable.

 * "git clone" learned the "--no-tags" option not to fetch \ 
all tags
   initially, and also set up the tagopt not to follow any tags in
   subsequent fetches.

 * "git archive --format=zip" learned to use zip64 extension when
   necessary to go beyond the 4GB limit.

 * "git reset" learned "--recurse-submodules" option.

 * "git diff --submodule=diff" now recurses into nested submodules.

 * "git repack" learned to accept the --threads=<n> option and \ 
pass it
   to pack-objects.

 * "git send-email" learned to run sendemail-validate hook to inspect
   and reject a message before sending it out.

 * There is no good reason why "git fetch $there $sha1" should fail
   when the $sha1 names an object at the tip of an advertised ref,
   even when the other side hasn't enabled allowTipSHA1InWant.

 * The "[includeIf "gitdir:$dir"] path=..." mechanism \ 
introduced in
   2.13.0 would canonicalize the path of the gitdir being matched,
   and did not match e.g. "gitdir:~/work/*" against a repo in
   "~/work/main" if "~/work" was a symlink to \ 
"/mnt/storage/work".
   Now we match both the resolved canonical path and what "pwd" would
   show. The include will happen if either one matches.

 * The "indent" heuristics is now the default in "diff". The
   diff.indentHeuristic configuration variable can be set to "false"
   for those who do not want it.

 * Many commands learned to pay attention to submodule.recurse
   configuration.

 * The convention for a command line is to follow "git cmdname
   --options" with revisions followed by an optional "--"
   disambiguator and then finally pathspecs.  When "--" is not there,
   we make sure early ones are all interpretable as revs (and do not
   look like paths) and later ones are the other way around.  A
   pathspec with "magic" (e.g. ":/p/a/t/h" that matches \ 
p/a/t/h from
   the top-level of the working tree, no matter what subdirectory you
   are working from) are conservatively judged as "not a path", which
   required disambiguation more often.  The command line parser
   learned to say "it's a pathspec" a bit more often when the syntax
   looks like so.

 * Update "perl-compatible regular expression" support to enable JIT
   and also allow linking with the newer PCRE v2 library.

 * "filter-branch" learned a pseudo filter "--setup" that \ 
can be used
   to define common functions/variables that can be used by other
   filters.

 * Using "git add d/i/r" when d/i/r is the top of the working tree of
   a separate repository would create a gitlink in the index, which
   would appear as a not-quite-initialized submodule to others.  We
   learned to give warnings when this happens.

 * "git status" learned to optionally give how many stash entries there
   are in its output.

 * "git status" has long shown essentially the same message as "git
   commit"; the message it gives while preparing for the root commit,
   i.e. "Initial commit", was hard to understand for some new users.
   Now it says "No commits yet" to stress more on the current status
   (rather than the commit the user is preparing for, which is more in
   line with the focus of "git commit").

 * "git send-email" now has --batch-size and --relogin-delay options
    which can be used to overcome limitations on SMTP servers that
    restrict on how many of e-mails can be sent in a single session.

 * An old message shown in the commit log template was removed, as it
   has outlived its usefulness.

 * "git pull --rebase --recurse-submodules" learns to rebase the
   branch in the submodules to an updated base.

 * "git log" learned -P as a synonym for --perl-regexp, "git \ 
grep"
   already had such a synonym.

 * "git log" didn't understand --regexp-ignore-case when combined with
   --perl-regexp. This has been fixed.

Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.

 * The default packed-git limit value has been raised on larger
   platforms to save "git fetch" from a (recoverable) failure while
   "gc" is running in parallel.

 * Code to update the cache-tree has been tightened so that we won't
   accidentally write out any 0{40} entry in the tree object.

 * Attempt to allow us notice "fishy" situation where we fail to
   remove the temporary directory used during the test.

 * Travis CI gained a task to format the documentation with both
   AsciiDoc and AsciiDoctor.

 * Some platforms have ulong that is smaller than time_t, and our
   historical use of ulong for timestamp would mean they cannot
   represent some timestamp that the platform allows.  Invent a
   separate and dedicated timestamp_t (so that we can distingiuish
   timestamps and a vanilla ulongs, which along is already a good
   move), and then declare uintmax_t is the type to be used as the
   timestamp_t.

 * We can trigger Windows auto-build tester (credits: Dscho &
   Microsoft) from our existing Travis CI tester now.

 * Conversion from uchar[20] to struct object_id continues.

 * Simplify parse_pathspec() codepath and stop it from looking at the
   default in-core index.

 * Add perf-test for wildmatch.

 * Code from "conversion using external process" codepath has been
   extracted to a separate sub-process.[ch] module.

 * When "git checkout", "git merge", etc. manipulates the in-core
   index, various pieces of information in the index extensions are
   discarded from the original state, as it is usually not the case
   that they are kept up-to-date and in-sync with the operation on the
   main index.  The untracked cache extension is copied across these
   operations now, which would speed up "git status" (as long as the
   cache is properly invalidated).

 * The internal implementation of "git grep" has seen some clean-up.

 * Update the C style recommendation for notes for translators, as
   recent versions of gettext tools can work with our style of
   multi-line comments.

 * The implementation of "ref" API around the "packed refs" \ 
have been
   cleaned up, in preparation for further changes.

 * The internal logic used in "git blame" has been libified to make it
   easier to use by cgit.

 * Our code often opens a path to an optional file, to work on its
   contents when we can successfully open it.  We can ignore a failure
   to open if such an optional file does not exist, but we do want to
   report a failure in opening for other reasons (e.g. we got an I/O
   error, or the file is there, but we lack the permission to open).

   The exact errors we need to ignore are ENOENT (obviously) and
   ENOTDIR (less obvious).  Instead of repeating comparison of errno
   with these two constants, introduce a helper function to do so.

 * We often try to open a file for reading whose existence is
   optional, and silently ignore errors from open/fopen; report such
   errors if they are not due to missing files.

 * When an existing repository is used for t/perf testing, we first
   create bit-for-bit copy of it, which may grab a transient state of
   the repository and freeze it into the repository used for testing,
   which then may cause Git operations to fail.  Single out "the index
   being locked" case and forcibly drop the lock from the copy.

 * Three instances of the same helper function have been consolidated
   to one.

 * "fast-import" uses a default pack chain depth that is consistent
   with other parts of the system.

 * A new test to show the interaction between the pattern [^a-z]
   (which matches '/') and a slash in a path has been added.  The
   pattern should not match the slash with "pathmatch", but should
   with "wildmatch".

 * The 'diff-highlight' program (in contrib/) has been restructured
   for easier reuse by an external project 'diff-so-fancy'.

 * A common pattern to free a piece of memory and assign NULL to the
   pointer that used to point at it has been replaced with a new
   FREE_AND_NULL() macro.

 * Traditionally, the default die() routine had a code to prevent it
   from getting called multiple times, which interacted badly when a
   threaded program used it (one downside is that the real error may
   be hidden and instead the only error message given to the user may
   end up being "die recursion detected", which is not very useful).

 * Introduce a "repository" object to eventually make it easier to
   work in multiple repositories (the primary focus is to work with
   the superproject and its submodules) in a single process.

 * Optimize "what are the object names already taken in an alternate
   object database?" query that is used to derive the length of prefix
   an object name is uniquely abbreviated to.

 * The hashmap API has been updated so that data to customize the
   behaviour of the comparison function can be specified at the time a
   hashmap is initialized.

 * The "collision detecting" SHA-1 implementation shipped with 2.13 is
   now integrated into git.git as a submodule (the first submodule to
   ship with git.git). Clone git.git with --recurse-submodules to get
   it. For now a non-submodule copy of the same code is also shipped
   as part of the tree.

 * A recent update made it easier to use "-fsanitize=" option while
   compiling but supported only one sanitize option.  Allow more than
   one to be combined, joined with a comma, like "make SANITIZE=foo,bar".

 * Use "p4 -G" to make "p4 changes" output more Python-friendly
   to parse.

 * We started using "%" PRItime, imitating "%" PRIuMAX and \ 
friends, as
   a way to format the internal timestamp value, but this does not
   play well with gettext(1) i18n framework, and causes "make pot"
   that is run by the l10n coordinator to create a broken po/git.pot
   file.  This is a possible workaround for that problem.

 * It turns out that Cygwin also needs the fopen() wrapper that
   returns failure when a directory is opened for reading.