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-rw-r--r--Documentation/RelNotes/2.24.0.txt143
-rw-r--r--Documentation/config.txt2
-rw-r--r--Documentation/config/core.txt6
-rw-r--r--Documentation/config/diff.txt2
-rw-r--r--Documentation/config/feature.txt29
-rw-r--r--Documentation/config/fetch.txt3
-rw-r--r--Documentation/config/format.txt1
-rw-r--r--Documentation/config/gc.txt2
-rw-r--r--Documentation/config/index.txt1
-rw-r--r--Documentation/config/pack.txt3
-rw-r--r--Documentation/config/remote.txt8
-rw-r--r--Documentation/fetch-options.txt7
-rw-r--r--Documentation/git-fast-export.txt6
-rw-r--r--Documentation/git-fast-import.txt2
-rw-r--r--Documentation/git-filter-branch.txt273
-rw-r--r--Documentation/git-format-patch.txt23
-rw-r--r--Documentation/git-gc.txt17
-rw-r--r--Documentation/git-merge.txt2
-rw-r--r--Documentation/git-rebase.txt5
-rw-r--r--Documentation/git-replace.txt10
-rw-r--r--Documentation/git-svn.txt10
-rw-r--r--Documentation/gitattributes.txt2
-rw-r--r--Documentation/gitcli.txt6
-rw-r--r--Documentation/githooks.txt32
-rw-r--r--Documentation/gitremote-helpers.txt10
-rw-r--r--Documentation/gitrepository-layout.txt2
-rw-r--r--Documentation/merge-options.txt32
-rw-r--r--Documentation/rev-list-options.txt16
-rw-r--r--Documentation/technical/api-tree-walking.txt8
-rw-r--r--Documentation/technical/partial-clone.txt117
30 files changed, 651 insertions, 129 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/RelNotes/2.24.0.txt b/Documentation/RelNotes/2.24.0.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000000..ff48d8582c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/Documentation/RelNotes/2.24.0.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,143 @@
+Git 2.24 Release Notes
+======================
+
+Updates since v2.23
+-------------------
+
+Backward compatibility note
+
+ * (no entry yet so far)
+
+
+UI, Workflows & Features
+
+ * We now have an active interim maintainer for the Git-Gui part of
+ the system. Praise and thank Pratyush Yadav for volunteering.
+
+ * The command line parser learned "--end-of-options" notation; the
+ standard convention for scripters to have hardcoded set of options
+ first on the command line, and force the command to treat end-user
+ input as non-options, has been to use "--" as the delimiter, but
+ that would not work for commands that use "--" as a delimiter
+ between revs and pathspec.
+
+ * A mechanism to affect the default setting for a (related) group of
+ configuration variables is introduced.
+
+ * "git fetch" learned "--set-upstream" option to help those who first
+ clone from their private fork they intend to push to, add the true
+ upstream via "git remote add" and then "git fetch" from it.
+
+ * Device-tree files learned their own userdiff patterns.
+ (merge 3c81760bc6 sb/userdiff-dts later to maint).
+
+ * "git rebase --rebase-merges" learned to drive different merge
+ strategies and pass strategy specific options to them.
+
+ * A new "pre-merge-commit" hook has been introduced.
+
+ * Command line completion updates for "git -c var.name=val" have been
+ added.
+
+ * The lazy clone machinery has been taught that there can be more
+ than one promisor remote and consult them in order when downloading
+ missing objects on demand.
+
+ * The list-objects-filter API (used to create a sparse/lazy clone)
+ learned to take a combined filter specification.
+
+
+Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.
+
+ * The code to write commit-graph over given commit object names has
+ been made a bit more robust.
+
+ * The first line of verbose output from each test piece now carries
+ the test name and number to help scanning with eyeballs.
+
+ * Further clean-up of the initialization code.
+
+ * xmalloc() used to have a mechanism to ditch memory and address
+ space resources as the last resort upon seeing an allocation
+ failure from the underlying malloc(), which made the code complex
+ and thread-unsafe with dubious benefit, as major memory resource
+ users already do limit their uses with various other mechanisms.
+ It has been simplified away.
+
+ * Unnecessary full-tree diff in "git log -L" machinery has been
+ optimized away.
+
+ * The http transport lacked some optimization the native transports
+ learned to avoid unnecessary ref advertisement, which has been
+ corrected.
+
+
+Fixes since v2.23
+-----------------
+
+ * "git grep --recurse-submodules" that looks at the working tree
+ files looked at the contents in the index in submodules, instead of
+ files in the working tree.
+ (merge 6a289d45c0 mt/grep-submodules-working-tree later to maint).
+
+ * Codepaths to walk tree objects have been audited for integer
+ overflows and hardened.
+ (merge 5aa02f9868 jk/tree-walk-overflow later to maint).
+
+ * "git pack-refs" can lose refs that are created while running, which
+ is getting corrected.
+ (merge a613d4f817 sc/pack-refs-deletion-racefix later to maint).
+
+ * "git checkout" and "git restore" to re-populate the index from a
+ tree-ish (typically HEAD) did not work correctly for a path that
+ was removed and then added again with the intent-to-add bit, when
+ the corresponding working tree file was empty. This has been
+ corrected.
+
+ * Compilation fix.
+ (merge 70597e8386 rs/nedalloc-fixlets later to maint).
+
+ * "git gui" learned to call the clean-up procedure before exiting.
+ (merge 0d88f3d2c5 py/git-gui-do-quit later to maint).
+
+ * We promoted the "indent heuristics" that decides where to split
+ diff hunks from experimental to the default a few years ago, but
+ some stale documentation still marked it as experimental, which has
+ been corrected.
+ (merge 64e5e1fba1 sg/diff-indent-heuristic-non-experimental later to maint).
+
+ * Fix a mismerge that happened in 2.22 timeframe.
+ (merge acb7da05ac en/checkout-mismerge-fix later to maint).
+
+ * "git archive" recorded incorrect length in extended pax header in
+ some corner cases, which has been corrected.
+ (merge 71d41ff651 rs/pax-extended-header-length-fix later to maint).
+
+ * On-demand object fetching in lazy clone incorrectly tried to fetch
+ commits from submodule projects, while still working in the
+ superproject, which has been corrected.
+ (merge a63694f523 jt/diff-lazy-fetch-submodule-fix later to maint).
+
+ * Prepare get_short_oid() codepath to be thread-safe.
+ (merge 7cfcb16b0e rs/sort-oid-array-thread-safe later to maint).
+
+ * "for-each-ref" and friends that show refs did not protect themselves
+ against ancient tags that did not record tagger names when asked to
+ show "%(taggername)", which have been corrected.
+ (merge 8b3f33ef11 mp/for-each-ref-missing-name-or-email later to maint).
+
+ * The "git am" based backend of "git rebase" ignored the result of
+ updating ".gitattributes" done in one step when replaying
+ subsequent steps.
+ (merge 2c65d90f75 bc/reread-attributes-during-rebase later to maint).
+
+ * Tell cURL library to use the same malloc() implementation, with the
+ xmalloc() wrapper, as the rest of the system, for consistency.
+ (merge 93b980e58f cb/curl-use-xmalloc later to maint).
+
+ * Other code cleanup, docfix, build fix, etc.
+ (merge d1387d3895 en/fast-import-merge-doc later to maint).
+ (merge 1c24a54ea4 bm/repository-layout-typofix later to maint).
+ (merge 415b770b88 ds/midx-expire-repack later to maint).
+ (merge 19800bdc3f nd/diff-parseopt later to maint).
+ (merge 58166c2e9d tg/t0021-racefix later to maint).
diff --git a/Documentation/config.txt b/Documentation/config.txt
index e3f5bc3396..77f3b1486b 100644
--- a/Documentation/config.txt
+++ b/Documentation/config.txt
@@ -345,6 +345,8 @@ include::config/difftool.txt[]
include::config/fastimport.txt[]
+include::config/feature.txt[]
+
include::config/fetch.txt[]
include::config/format.txt[]
diff --git a/Documentation/config/core.txt b/Documentation/config/core.txt
index 75538d27e7..852d2ba37a 100644
--- a/Documentation/config/core.txt
+++ b/Documentation/config/core.txt
@@ -86,7 +86,9 @@ core.untrackedCache::
it will automatically be removed, if set to `false`. Before
setting it to `true`, you should check that mtime is working
properly on your system.
- See linkgit:git-update-index[1]. `keep` by default.
+ See linkgit:git-update-index[1]. `keep` by default, unless
+ `feature.manyFiles` is enabled which sets this setting to
+ `true` by default.
core.checkStat::
When missing or is set to `default`, many fields in the stat
@@ -577,7 +579,7 @@ the `GIT_NOTES_REF` environment variable. See linkgit:git-notes[1].
core.commitGraph::
If true, then git will read the commit-graph file (if it exists)
- to parse the graph structure of commits. Defaults to false. See
+ to parse the graph structure of commits. Defaults to true. See
linkgit:git-commit-graph[1] for more information.
core.useReplaceRefs::
diff --git a/Documentation/config/diff.txt b/Documentation/config/diff.txt
index 5afb5a2cbc..ff09f1cf73 100644
--- a/Documentation/config/diff.txt
+++ b/Documentation/config/diff.txt
@@ -189,7 +189,7 @@ diff.guitool::
include::../mergetools-diff.txt[]
diff.indentHeuristic::
- Set this option to `true` to enable experimental heuristics
+ Set this option to `false` to disable the default heuristics
that shift diff hunk boundaries to make patches easier to read.
diff.algorithm::
diff --git a/Documentation/config/feature.txt b/Documentation/config/feature.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000000..545522f306
--- /dev/null
+++ b/Documentation/config/feature.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,29 @@
+feature.*::
+ The config settings that start with `feature.` modify the defaults of
+ a group of other config settings. These groups are created by the Git
+ developer community as recommended defaults and are subject to change.
+ In particular, new config options may be added with different defaults.
+
+feature.experimental::
+ Enable config options that are new to Git, and are being considered for
+ future defaults. Config settings included here may be added or removed
+ with each release, including minor version updates. These settings may
+ have unintended interactions since they are so new. Please enable this
+ setting if you are interested in providing feedback on experimental
+ features. The new default values are:
++
+* `pack.useSparse=true` uses a new algorithm when constructing a pack-file
+which can improve `git push` performance in repos with many files.
++
+* `fetch.negotiationAlgorithm=skipping` may improve fetch negotiation times by
+skipping more commits at a time, reducing the number of round trips.
+
+feature.manyFiles::
+ Enable config options that optimize for repos with many files in the
+ working directory. With many files, commands such as `git status` and
+ `git checkout` may be slow and these new defaults improve performance:
++
+* `index.version=4` enables path-prefix compression in the index.
++
+* `core.untrackedCache=true` enables the untracked cache. This setting assumes
+that mtime is working on your machine.
diff --git a/Documentation/config/fetch.txt b/Documentation/config/fetch.txt
index ba890b5884..d402110638 100644
--- a/Documentation/config/fetch.txt
+++ b/Documentation/config/fetch.txt
@@ -59,7 +59,8 @@ fetch.negotiationAlgorithm::
effort to converge faster, but may result in a larger-than-necessary
packfile; The default is "default" which instructs Git to use the default algorithm
that never skips commits (unless the server has acknowledged it or one
- of its descendants).
+ of its descendants). If `feature.experimental` is enabled, then this
+ setting defaults to "skipping".
Unknown values will cause 'git fetch' to error out.
+
See also the `--negotiation-tip` option for linkgit:git-fetch[1].
diff --git a/Documentation/config/format.txt b/Documentation/config/format.txt
index 414a5a8a9d..cb629fa769 100644
--- a/Documentation/config/format.txt
+++ b/Documentation/config/format.txt
@@ -77,6 +77,7 @@ format.coverLetter::
A boolean that controls whether to generate a cover-letter when
format-patch is invoked, but in addition can be set to "auto", to
generate a cover-letter only when there's more than one patch.
+ Default is false.
format.outputDirectory::
Set a custom directory to store the resulting files instead of the
diff --git a/Documentation/config/gc.txt b/Documentation/config/gc.txt
index 02b92b18b5..00ea0a678e 100644
--- a/Documentation/config/gc.txt
+++ b/Documentation/config/gc.txt
@@ -63,7 +63,7 @@ gc.writeCommitGraph::
If true, then gc will rewrite the commit-graph file when
linkgit:git-gc[1] is run. When using `git gc --auto`
the commit-graph will be updated if housekeeping is
- required. Default is false. See linkgit:git-commit-graph[1]
+ required. Default is true. See linkgit:git-commit-graph[1]
for details.
gc.logExpiry::
diff --git a/Documentation/config/index.txt b/Documentation/config/index.txt
index f181503041..7cb50b37e9 100644
--- a/Documentation/config/index.txt
+++ b/Documentation/config/index.txt
@@ -24,3 +24,4 @@ index.threads::
index.version::
Specify the version with which new index files should be
initialized. This does not affect existing repositories.
+ If `feature.manyFiles` is enabled, then the default is 4.
diff --git a/Documentation/config/pack.txt b/Documentation/config/pack.txt
index 9cdcfa7324..1d66f0c992 100644
--- a/Documentation/config/pack.txt
+++ b/Documentation/config/pack.txt
@@ -112,7 +112,8 @@ pack.useSparse::
objects. This can have significant performance benefits when
computing a pack to send a small change. However, it is possible
that extra objects are added to the pack-file if the included
- commits contain certain types of direct renames.
+ commits contain certain types of direct renames. Default is `false`
+ unless `feature.experimental` is enabled.
pack.writeBitmaps (deprecated)::
This is a deprecated synonym for `repack.writeBitmaps`.
diff --git a/Documentation/config/remote.txt b/Documentation/config/remote.txt
index 6c4cad83a2..a8e6437a90 100644
--- a/Documentation/config/remote.txt
+++ b/Documentation/config/remote.txt
@@ -76,3 +76,11 @@ remote.<name>.pruneTags::
+
See also `remote.<name>.prune` and the PRUNING section of
linkgit:git-fetch[1].
+
+remote.<name>.promisor::
+ When set to true, this remote will be used to fetch promisor
+ objects.
+
+remote.<name>.partialclonefilter::
+ The filter that will be applied when fetching from this
+ promisor remote.
diff --git a/Documentation/fetch-options.txt b/Documentation/fetch-options.txt
index 3c9b4f9e09..99df1f3d4e 100644
--- a/Documentation/fetch-options.txt
+++ b/Documentation/fetch-options.txt
@@ -169,6 +169,13 @@ ifndef::git-pull[]
Disable recursive fetching of submodules (this has the same effect as
using the `--recurse-submodules=no` option).
+--set-upstream::
+ If the remote is fetched successfully, pull and add upstream
+ (tracking) reference, used by argument-less
+ linkgit:git-pull[1] and other commands. For more information,
+ see `branch.<name>.merge` and `branch.<name>.remote` in
+ linkgit:git-config[1].
+
--submodule-prefix=<path>::
Prepend <path> to paths printed in informative messages
such as "Fetching submodule foo". This option is used
diff --git a/Documentation/git-fast-export.txt b/Documentation/git-fast-export.txt
index cc940eb9ad..784e934009 100644
--- a/Documentation/git-fast-export.txt
+++ b/Documentation/git-fast-export.txt
@@ -17,9 +17,9 @@ This program dumps the given revisions in a form suitable to be piped
into 'git fast-import'.
You can use it as a human-readable bundle replacement (see
-linkgit:git-bundle[1]), or as a kind of an interactive
-'git filter-branch'.
-
+linkgit:git-bundle[1]), or as a format that can be edited before being
+fed to 'git fast-import' in order to do history rewrites (an ability
+relied on by tools like 'git filter-repo').
OPTIONS
-------
diff --git a/Documentation/git-fast-import.txt b/Documentation/git-fast-import.txt
index fad327aecc..0bb276269e 100644
--- a/Documentation/git-fast-import.txt
+++ b/Documentation/git-fast-import.txt
@@ -391,7 +391,7 @@ change to the project.
('encoding' SP <encoding>)?
data
('from' SP <commit-ish> LF)?
- ('merge' SP <commit-ish> LF)?
+ ('merge' SP <commit-ish> LF)*
(filemodify | filedelete | filecopy | filerename | filedeleteall | notemodify)*
LF?
....
diff --git a/Documentation/git-filter-branch.txt b/Documentation/git-filter-branch.txt
index 6b53dd7e06..5876598852 100644
--- a/Documentation/git-filter-branch.txt
+++ b/Documentation/git-filter-branch.txt
@@ -16,6 +16,19 @@ SYNOPSIS
[--original <namespace>] [-d <directory>] [-f | --force]
[--state-branch <branch>] [--] [<rev-list options>...]
+WARNING
+-------
+'git filter-branch' has a plethora of pitfalls that can produce non-obvious
+manglings of the intended history rewrite (and can leave you with little
+time to investigate such problems since it has such abysmal performance).
+These safety and performance issues cannot be backward compatibly fixed and
+as such, its use is not recommended. Please use an alternative history
+filtering tool such as https://github.com/newren/git-filter-repo/[git
+filter-repo]. If you still need to use 'git filter-branch', please
+carefully read <<SAFETY>> (and <<PERFORMANCE>>) to learn about the land
+mines of filter-branch, and then vigilantly avoid as many of the hazards
+listed there as reasonably possible.
+
DESCRIPTION
-----------
Lets you rewrite Git revision history by rewriting the branches mentioned
@@ -445,36 +458,236 @@ warned.
(or if your git-gc is not new enough to support arguments to
`--prune`, use `git repack -ad; git prune` instead).
-NOTES
------
-
-git-filter-branch allows you to make complex shell-scripted rewrites
-of your Git history, but you probably don't need this flexibility if
-you're simply _removing unwanted data_ like large files or passwords.
-For those operations you may want to consider
-http://rtyley.github.io/bfg-repo-cleaner/[The BFG Repo-Cleaner],
-a JVM-based alternative to git-filter-branch, typically at least
-10-50x faster for those use-cases, and with quite different
-characteristics:
-
-* Any particular version of a file is cleaned exactly _once_. The BFG,
- unlike git-filter-branch, does not give you the opportunity to
- handle a file differently based on where or when it was committed
- within your history. This constraint gives the core performance
- benefit of The BFG, and is well-suited to the task of cleansing bad
- data - you don't care _where_ the bad data is, you just want it
- _gone_.
-
-* By default The BFG takes full advantage of multi-core machines,
- cleansing commit file-trees in parallel. git-filter-branch cleans
- commits sequentially (i.e. in a single-threaded manner), though it
- _is_ possible to write filters that include their own parallelism,
- in the scripts executed against each commit.
-
-* The http://rtyley.github.io/bfg-repo-cleaner/#examples[command options]
- are much more restrictive than git-filter branch, and dedicated just
- to the tasks of removing unwanted data- e.g:
- `--strip-blobs-bigger-than 1M`.
+[[PERFORMANCE]]
+PERFORMANCE
+-----------
+
+The performance of git-filter-branch is glacially slow; its design makes it
+impossible for a backward-compatible implementation to ever be fast:
+
+* In editing files, git-filter-branch by design checks out each and
+every commit as it existed in the original repo. If your repo has 10\^5
+files and 10\^5 commits, but each commit only modifies 5 files, then
+git-filter-branch will make you do 10\^10 modifications, despite only
+having (at most) 5*10^5 unique blobs.
+
+* If you try and cheat and try to make git-filter-branch only work on
+files modified in a commit, then two things happen
+
+ ** you run into problems with deletions whenever the user is simply
+ trying to rename files (because attempting to delete files that
+ don't exist looks like a no-op; it takes some chicanery to remap
+ deletes across file renames when the renames happen via arbitrary
+ user-provided shell)
+
+ ** even if you succeed at the map-deletes-for-renames chicanery, you
+ still technically violate backward compatibility because users are
+ allowed to filter files in ways that depend upon topology of
+ commits instead of filtering solely based on file contents or names
+ (though this has not been observed in the wild).
+
+* Even if you don't need to edit files but only want to e.g. rename or
+remove some and thus can avoid checking out each file (i.e. you can use
+--index-filter), you still are passing shell snippets for your filters.
+This means that for every commit, you have to have a prepared git repo
+where those filters can be run. That's a significant setup.
+
+* Further, several additional files are created or updated per commit by
+git-filter-branch. Some of these are for supporting the convenience
+functions provided by git-filter-branch (such as map()), while others
+are for keeping track of internal state (but could have also been
+accessed by user filters; one of git-filter-branch's regression tests
+does so). This essentially amounts to using the filesystem as an IPC
+mechanism between git-filter-branch and the user-provided filters.
+Disks tend to be a slow IPC mechanism, and writing these files also
+effectively represents a forced synchronization point between separate
+processes that we hit with every commit.
+
+* The user-provided shell commands will likely involve a pipeline of
+commands, resulting in the creation of many processes per commit.
+Creating and running another process takes a widely varying amount of
+time between operating systems, but on any platform it is very slow
+relative to invoking a function.
+
+* git-filter-branch itself is written in shell, which is kind of slow.
+This is the one performance issue that could be backward-compatibly
+fixed, but compared to the above problems that are intrinsic to the
+design of git-filter-branch, the language of the tool itself is a
+relatively minor issue.
+
+ ** Side note: Unfortunately, people tend to fixate on the
+ written-in-shell aspect and periodically ask if git-filter-branch
+ could be rewritten in another language to fix the performance
+ issues. Not only does that ignore the bigger intrinsic problems
+ with the design, it'd help less than you'd expect: if
+ git-filter-branch itself were not shell, then the convenience
+ functions (map(), skip_commit(), etc) and the `--setup` argument
+ could no longer be executed once at the beginning of the program
+ but would instead need to be prepended to every user filter (and
+ thus re-executed with every commit).
+
+The https://github.com/newren/git-filter-repo/[git filter-repo] tool is
+an alternative to git-filter-branch which does not suffer from these
+performance problems or the safety problems (mentioned below). For those
+with existing tooling which relies upon git-filter-branch, 'git
+repo-filter' also provides
+https://github.com/newren/git-filter-repo/blob/master/contrib/filter-repo-demos/filter-lamely[filter-lamely],
+a drop-in git-filter-branch replacement (with a few caveats). While
+filter-lamely suffers from all the same safety issues as
+git-filter-branch, it at least ameloriates the performance issues a
+little.
+
+[[SAFETY]]
+SAFETY
+------
+
+git-filter-branch is riddled with gotchas resulting in various ways to
+easily corrupt repos or end up with a mess worse than what you started
+with:
+
+* Someone can have a set of "working and tested filters" which they
+document or provide to a coworker, who then runs them on a different OS
+where the same commands are not working/tested (some examples in the
+git-filter-branch manpage are also affected by this). BSD vs. GNU
+userland differences can really bite. If lucky, error messages are
+spewed. But just as likely, the commands either don't do the filtering
+requested, or silently corrupt by making some unwanted change. The
+unwanted change may only affect a few commits, so it's not necessarily
+obvious either. (The fact that problems won't necessarily be obvious
+means they are likely to go unnoticed until the rewritten history is in
+use for quite a while, at which point it's really hard to justify
+another flag-day for another rewrite.)
+
+* Filenames with spaces are often mishandled by shell snippets since
+they cause problems for shell pipelines. Not everyone is familiar with
+find -print0, xargs -0, git-ls-files -z, etc. Even people who are
+familiar with these may assume such flags are not relevant because
+someone else renamed any such files in their repo back before the person
+doing the filtering joined the project. And often, even those familiar
+with handling arguments with spaces may not do so just because they
+aren't in the mindset of thinking about everything that could possibly
+go wrong.
+
+* Non-ascii filenames can be silently removed despite being in a desired
+directory. Keeping only wanted paths is often done using pipelines like
+`git ls-files | grep -v ^WANTED_DIR/ | xargs git rm`. ls-files will
+only quote filenames if needed, so folks may not notice that one of the
+files didn't match the regex (at least not until it's much too late).
+Yes, someone who knows about core.quotePath can avoid this (unless they
+have other special characters like \t, \n, or "), and people who use
+ls-files -z with something other than grep can avoid this, but that
+doesn't mean they will.
+
+* Similarly, when moving files around, one can find that filenames with
+non-ascii or special characters end up in a different directory, one
+that includes a double quote character. (This is technically the same
+issue as above with quoting, but perhaps an interesting different way
+that it can and has manifested as a problem.)
+
+* It's far too easy to accidentally mix up old and new history. It's
+still possible with any tool, but git-filter-branch almost invites it.
+If lucky, the only downside is users getting frustrated that they don't
+know how to shrink their repo and remove the old stuff. If unlucky,
+they merge old and new history and end up with multiple "copies" of each
+commit, some of which have unwanted or sensitive files and others which
+don't. This comes about in multiple different ways:
+
+ ** the default to only doing a partial history rewrite ('--all' is not
+ the default and few examples show it)
+
+ ** the fact that there's no automatic post-run cleanup
+
+ ** the fact that --tag-name-filter (when used to rename tags) doesn't
+ remove the old tags but just adds new ones with the new name
+
+ ** the fact that little educational information is provided to inform
+ users of the ramifications of a rewrite and how to avoid mixing old
+ and new history. For example, this man page discusses how users
+ need to understand that they need to rebase their changes for all
+ their branches on top of new history (or delete and reclone), but
+ that's only one of multiple concerns to consider. See the
+ "DISCUSSION" section of the git filter-repo manual page for more
+ details.
+
+* Annotated tags can be accidentally converted to lightweight tags, due
+to either of two issues:
+
+ ** Someone can do a history rewrite, realize they messed up, restore
+ from the backups in refs/original/, and then redo their
+ git-filter-branch command. (The backup in refs/original/ is not a
+ real backup; it dereferences tags first.)
+
+ ** Running git-filter-branch with either --tags or --all in your
+ <rev-list options>. In order to retain annotated tags as
+ annotated, you must use --tag-name-filter (and must not have
+ restored from refs/original/ in a previously botched rewrite).
+
+* Any commit messages that specify an encoding will become corrupted
+by the rewrite; git-filter-branch ignores the encoding, takes the original
+bytes, and feeds it to commit-tree without telling it the proper
+encoding. (This happens whether or not --msg-filter is used.)
+
+* Commit messages (even if they are all UTF-8) by default become
+corrupted due to not being updated -- any references to other commit
+hashes in commit messages will now refer to no-longer-extant commits.
+
+* There are no facilities for helping users find what unwanted crud they
+should delete, which means they are much more likely to have incomplete
+or partial cleanups that sometimes result in confusion and people
+wasting time trying to understand. (For example, folks tend to just
+look for big files to delete instead of big directories or extensions,
+and once they do so, then sometime later folks using the new repository
+who are going through history will notice a build artifact directory
+that has some files but not others, or a cache of dependencies
+(node_modules or similar) which couldn't have ever been functional since
+it's missing some files.)
+
+* If --prune-empty isn't specified, then the filtering process can
+create hoards of confusing empty commits
+
+* If --prune-empty is specified, then intentionally placed empty
+commits from before the filtering operation are also pruned instead of
+just pruning commits that became empty due to filtering rules.
+
+* If --prune empty is specified, sometimes empty commits are missed
+and left around anyway (a somewhat rare bug, but it happens...)
+
+* A minor issue, but users who have a goal to update all names and
+emails in a repository may be led to --env-filter which will only update
+authors and committers, missing taggers.
+
+* If the user provides a --tag-name-filter that maps multiple tags to
+the same name, no warning or error is provided; git-filter-branch simply
+overwrites each tag in some undocumented pre-defined order resulting in
+only one tag at the end. (A git-filter-branch regression test requires
+this surprising behavior.)
+
+Also, the poor performance of git-filter-branch often leads to safety
+issues:
+
+* Coming up with the correct shell snippet to do the filtering you want
+is sometimes difficult unless you're just doing a trivial modification
+such as deleting a couple files. Unfortunately, people often learn if
+the snippet is right or wrong by trying it out, but the rightness or
+wrongness can vary depending on special circumstances (spaces in
+filenames, non-ascii filenames, funny author names or emails, invalid
+timezones, presence of grafts or replace objects, etc.), meaning they
+may have to wait a long time, hit an error, then restart. The
+performance of git-filter-branch is so bad that this cycle is painful,
+reducing the time available to carefully re-check (to say nothing about
+what it does to the patience of the person doing the rewrite even if
+they do technically have more time available). This problem is extra
+compounded because errors from broken filters may not be shown for a
+long time and/or get lost in a sea of output. Even worse, broken
+filters often just result in silent incorrect rewrites.
+
+* To top it all off, even when users finally find working commands, they
+naturally want to share them. But they may be unaware that their repo
+didn't have some special cases that someone else's does. So, when
+someone else with a different repository runs the same commands, they
+get hit by the problems above. Or, the user just runs commands that
+really were vetted for special cases, but they run it on a different OS
+where it doesn't work, as noted above.
GIT
---
diff --git a/Documentation/git-format-patch.txt b/Documentation/git-format-patch.txt
index b9b97e63ae..0ac56f4b70 100644
--- a/Documentation/git-format-patch.txt
+++ b/Documentation/git-format-patch.txt
@@ -17,9 +17,9 @@ SYNOPSIS
[--signature-file=<file>]
[-n | --numbered | -N | --no-numbered]
[--start-number <n>] [--numbered-files]
- [--in-reply-to=Message-Id] [--suffix=.<sfx>]
+ [--in-reply-to=<message id>] [--suffix=.<sfx>]
[--ignore-if-in-upstream]
- [--rfc] [--subject-prefix=Subject-Prefix]
+ [--rfc] [--subject-prefix=<subject prefix>]
[(--reroll-count|-v) <n>]
[--to=<email>] [--cc=<email>]
[--[no-]cover-letter] [--quiet]
@@ -159,9 +159,9 @@ Beware that the default for 'git send-email' is to thread emails
itself. If you want `git format-patch` to take care of threading, you
will want to ensure that threading is disabled for `git send-email`.
---in-reply-to=Message-Id::
+--in-reply-to=<message id>::
Make the first mail (or all the mails with `--no-thread`) appear as a
- reply to the given Message-Id, which avoids breaking threads to
+ reply to the given <message id>, which avoids breaking threads to
provide a new patch series.
--ignore-if-in-upstream::
@@ -171,9 +171,9 @@ will want to ensure that threading is disabled for `git send-email`.
patches being generated, and any patch that matches is
ignored.
---subject-prefix=<Subject-Prefix>::
+--subject-prefix=<subject prefix>::
Instead of the standard '[PATCH]' prefix in the subject
- line, instead use '[<Subject-Prefix>]'. This
+ line, instead use '[<subject prefix>]'. This
allows for useful naming of a patch series, and can be
combined with the `--numbered` option.
@@ -314,7 +314,8 @@ you can use `--suffix=-patch` to get `0001-description-of-my-change-patch`.
--base=<commit>::
Record the base tree information to identify the state the
patch series applies to. See the BASE TREE INFORMATION section
- below for details.
+ below for details. If <commit> is "auto", a base commit is
+ automatically chosen.
--root::
Treat the revision argument as a <revision range>, even if it
@@ -330,8 +331,9 @@ CONFIGURATION
-------------
You can specify extra mail header lines to be added to each message,
defaults for the subject prefix and file suffix, number patches when
-outputting more than one patch, add "To" or "Cc:" headers, configure
-attachments, and sign off patches with configuration variables.
+outputting more than one patch, add "To:" or "Cc:" headers, configure
+attachments, change the patch output directory, and sign off patches
+with configuration variables.
------------
[format]
@@ -343,7 +345,8 @@ attachments, and sign off patches with configuration variables.
cc = <email>
attach [ = mime-boundary-string ]
signOff = true
- coverletter = auto
+ outputDirectory = <directory>
+ coverLetter = auto
------------
diff --git a/Documentation/git-gc.txt b/Documentation/git-gc.txt
index 247f765604..0c114ad1ca 100644
--- a/Documentation/git-gc.txt
+++ b/Documentation/git-gc.txt
@@ -115,15 +115,14 @@ NOTES
-----
'git gc' tries very hard not to delete objects that are referenced
-anywhere in your repository. In
-particular, it will keep not only objects referenced by your current set
-of branches and tags, but also objects referenced by the index,
-remote-tracking branches, refs saved by 'git filter-branch' in
-refs/original/, reflogs (which may reference commits in branches
-that were later amended or rewound), and anything else in the refs/* namespace.
-If you are expecting some objects to be deleted and they aren't, check
-all of those locations and decide whether it makes sense in your case to
-remove those references.
+anywhere in your repository. In particular, it will keep not only
+objects referenced by your current set of branches and tags, but also
+objects referenced by the index, remote-tracking branches, notes saved
+by 'git notes' under refs/notes/, reflogs (which may reference commits
+in branches that were later amended or rewound), and anything else in
+the refs/* namespace. If you are expecting some objects to be deleted
+and they aren't, check all of those locations and decide whether it
+makes sense in your case to remove those references.
On the other hand, when 'git gc' runs concurrently with another process,
there is a risk of it deleting an object that the other process is using
diff --git a/Documentation/git-merge.txt b/Documentation/git-merge.txt
index 01fd52dc70..092529c619 100644
--- a/Documentation/git-merge.txt
+++ b/Documentation/git-merge.txt
@@ -10,7 +10,7 @@ SYNOPSIS
--------
[verse]
'git merge' [-n] [--stat] [--no-commit] [--squash] [--[no-]edit]
- [-s <strategy>] [-X <strategy-option>] [-S[<keyid>]]
+ [--no-verify] [-s <strategy>] [-X <strategy-option>] [-S[<keyid>]]
[--[no-]allow-unrelated-histories]
[--[no-]rerere-autoupdate] [-m <msg>] [-F <file>] [<commit>...]
'git merge' (--continue | --abort | --quit)
diff --git a/Documentation/git-rebase.txt b/Documentation/git-rebase.txt
index 6156609cf7..7ecf766077 100644
--- a/Documentation/git-rebase.txt
+++ b/Documentation/git-rebase.txt
@@ -543,8 +543,6 @@ In addition, the following pairs of options are incompatible:
* --preserve-merges and --interactive
* --preserve-merges and --signoff
* --preserve-merges and --rebase-merges
- * --rebase-merges and --strategy
- * --rebase-merges and --strategy-option
BEHAVIORAL DIFFERENCES
-----------------------
@@ -832,7 +830,8 @@ Hard case: The changes are not the same.::
This happens if the 'subsystem' rebase had conflicts, or used
`--interactive` to omit, edit, squash, or fixup commits; or
if the upstream used one of `commit --amend`, `reset`, or
- `filter-branch`.
+ a full history rewriting command like
+ https://github.com/newren/git-filter-repo[`filter-repo`].
The easy case
diff --git a/Documentation/git-replace.txt b/Documentation/git-replace.txt
index 246dc9943c..f271d758c3 100644
--- a/Documentation/git-replace.txt
+++ b/Documentation/git-replace.txt
@@ -123,10 +123,10 @@ The following format are available:
CREATING REPLACEMENT OBJECTS
----------------------------
-linkgit:git-filter-branch[1], linkgit:git-hash-object[1] and
-linkgit:git-rebase[1], among other git commands, can be used to create
-replacement objects from existing objects. The `--edit` option can
-also be used with 'git replace' to create a replacement object by
+linkgit:git-hash-object[1], linkgit:git-rebase[1], and
+https://github.com/newren/git-filter-repo[git-filter-repo], among other git commands, can be used to
+create replacement objects from existing objects. The `--edit` option
+can also be used with 'git replace' to create a replacement object by
editing an existing object.
If you want to replace many blobs, trees or commits that are part of a
@@ -148,13 +148,13 @@ pending objects.
SEE ALSO
--------
linkgit:git-hash-object[1]
-linkgit:git-filter-branch[1]
linkgit:git-rebase[1]
linkgit:git-tag[1]
linkgit:git-branch[1]
linkgit:git-commit[1]
linkgit:git-var[1]
linkgit:git[1]
+https://github.com/newren/git-filter-repo[git-filter-repo]
GIT
---
diff --git a/Documentation/git-svn.txt b/Documentation/git-svn.txt
index 30711625fd..53774f5b64 100644
--- a/Documentation/git-svn.txt
+++ b/Documentation/git-svn.txt
@@ -769,11 +769,11 @@ option for (hopefully) obvious reasons.
+
This option is NOT recommended as it makes it difficult to track down
old references to SVN revision numbers in existing documentation, bug
-reports and archives. If you plan to eventually migrate from SVN to Git
-and are certain about dropping SVN history, consider
-linkgit:git-filter-branch[1] instead. filter-branch also allows
-reformatting of metadata for ease-of-reading and rewriting authorship
-info for non-"svn.authorsFile" users.
+reports, and archives. If you plan to eventually migrate from SVN to
+Git and are certain about dropping SVN history, consider
+https://github.com/newren/git-filter-repo[git-filter-repo] instead.
+filter-repo also allows reformatting of metadata for ease-of-reading
+and rewriting authorship info for non-"svn.authorsFile" users.
svn.useSvmProps::
svn-remote.<name>.useSvmProps::
diff --git a/Documentation/gitattributes.txt b/Documentation/gitattributes.txt
index fb1d188d44..c5a528c667 100644
--- a/Documentation/gitattributes.txt
+++ b/Documentation/gitattributes.txt
@@ -810,6 +810,8 @@ patterns are available:
- `css` suitable for cascading style sheets.
+- `dts` suitable for devicetree (DTS) files.
+
- `fortran` suitable for source code in the Fortran language.
- `fountain` suitable for Fountain documents.
diff --git a/Documentation/gitcli.txt b/Documentation/gitcli.txt
index 1ed3ca33b7..4b32876b6e 100644
--- a/Documentation/gitcli.txt
+++ b/Documentation/gitcli.txt
@@ -37,6 +37,12 @@ arguments. Here are the rules:
file called HEAD in your work tree, `git diff HEAD` is ambiguous, and
you have to say either `git diff HEAD --` or `git diff -- HEAD` to
disambiguate.
+
+ * Because `--` disambiguates revisions and paths in some commands, it
+ cannot be used for those commands to separate options and revisions.
+ You can use `--end-of-options` for this (it also works for commands
+ that do not distinguish between revisions in paths, in which case it
+ is simply an alias for `--`).
+
When writing a script that is expected to handle random user-input, it is
a good practice to make it explicit which arguments are which by placing
diff --git a/Documentation/githooks.txt b/Documentation/githooks.txt
index 82cd573776..50365f2914 100644
--- a/Documentation/githooks.txt
+++ b/Documentation/githooks.txt
@@ -103,6 +103,28 @@ The default 'pre-commit' hook, when enabled--and with the
`hooks.allownonascii` config option unset or set to false--prevents
the use of non-ASCII filenames.
+pre-merge-commit
+~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+
+This hook is invoked by linkgit:git-merge[1], and can be bypassed
+with the `--no-verify` option. It takes no parameters, and is
+invoked after the merge has been carried out successfully and before
+obtaining the proposed commit log message to
+make a commit. Exiting with a non-zero status from this script
+causes the `git merge` command to abort before creating a commit.
+
+The default 'pre-merge-commit' hook, when enabled, runs the
+'pre-commit' hook, if the latter is enabled.
+
+This hook is invoked with the environment variable
+`GIT_EDITOR=:` if the command will not bring up an editor
+to modify the commit message.
+
+If the merge cannot be carried out automatically, the conflicts
+need to be resolved and the result committed separately (see
+linkgit:git-merge[1]). At that point, this hook will not be executed,
+but the 'pre-commit' hook will, if it is enabled.
+
prepare-commit-msg
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
@@ -425,10 +447,12 @@ post-rewrite
This hook is invoked by commands that rewrite commits
(linkgit:git-commit[1] when called with `--amend` and
-linkgit:git-rebase[1]; currently `git filter-branch` does 'not' call
-it!). Its first argument denotes the command it was invoked by:
-currently one of `amend` or `rebase`. Further command-dependent
-arguments may be passed in the future.
+linkgit:git-rebase[1]; however, full-history (re)writing tools like
+linkgit:git-fast-import[1] or
+https://github.com/newren/git-filter-repo[git-filter-repo] typically
+do not call it!). Its first argument denotes the command it was
+invoked by: currently one of `amend` or `rebase`. Further
+command-dependent arguments may be passed in the future.
The hook receives a list of the rewritten commits on stdin, in the
format
diff --git a/Documentation/gitremote-helpers.txt b/Documentation/gitremote-helpers.txt
index 43f80c8068..a5c3c04371 100644
--- a/Documentation/gitremote-helpers.txt
+++ b/Documentation/gitremote-helpers.txt
@@ -297,9 +297,13 @@ Supported if the helper has the "option" capability.
same batch are complete. Only objects which were reported
in the output of 'list' with a sha1 may be fetched this way.
+
-Optionally may output a 'lock <file>' line indicating a file under
-GIT_DIR/objects/pack which is keeping a pack until refs can be
-suitably updated.
+Optionally may output a 'lock <file>' line indicating the full path of
+a file under `$GIT_DIR/objects/pack` which is keeping a pack until
+refs can be suitably updated. The path must end with `.keep`. This is
+a mechanism to name a <pack,idx,keep> tuple by giving only the keep
+component. The kept pack will not be deleted by a concurrent repack,
+even though its objects may not be referenced until the fetch completes.
+The `.keep` file will be deleted at the conclusion of the fetch.
+
If option 'check-connectivity' is requested, the helper must output
'connectivity-ok' if the clone is self-contained and connected.
diff --git a/Documentation/gitrepository-layout.txt b/Documentation/gitrepository-layout.txt
index 216b11ee88..d6388f10bb 100644
--- a/Documentation/gitrepository-layout.txt
+++ b/Documentation/gitrepository-layout.txt
@@ -59,7 +59,7 @@ objects/[0-9a-f][0-9a-f]::
here are often called 'unpacked' (or 'loose') objects.
objects/pack::
- Packs (files that store many object in compressed form,
+ Packs (files that store many objects in compressed form,
along with index files to allow them to be randomly
accessed) are found in this directory.
diff --git a/Documentation/merge-options.txt b/Documentation/merge-options.txt
index 79a00d2a4a..59b8ff1e51 100644
--- a/Documentation/merge-options.txt
+++ b/Documentation/merge-options.txt
@@ -40,20 +40,24 @@ set to `no` at the beginning of them.
case of a merge conflict.
--ff::
- When the merge resolves as a fast-forward, only update the branch
- pointer, without creating a merge commit. This is the default
- behavior.
-
--no-ff::
- Create a merge commit even when the merge resolves as a
- fast-forward. This is the default behaviour when merging an
- annotated (and possibly signed) tag that is not stored in
- its natural place in 'refs/tags/' hierarchy.
-
--ff-only::
- Refuse to merge and exit with a non-zero status unless the
- current `HEAD` is already up to date or the merge can be
- resolved as a fast-forward.
+ Specifies how a merge is handled when the merged-in history is
+ already a descendant of the current history. `--ff` is the
+ default unless merging an annotated (and possibly signed) tag
+ that is not stored in its natural place in the `refs/tags/`
+ hierarchy, in which case `--no-ff` is assumed.
++
+With `--ff`, when possible resolve the merge as a fast-forward (only
+update the branch pointer to match the merged branch; do not create a
+merge commit). When not possible (when the merged-in history is not a
+descendant of the current history), create a merge commit.
++
+With `--no-ff`, create a merge commit in all cases, even when the merge
+could instead be resolved as a fast-forward.
++
+With `--ff-only`, resolve the merge as a fast-forward when possible.
+When not possible, refuse to merge and exit with a non-zero status.
-S[<keyid>]::
--gpg-sign[=<keyid>]::
@@ -105,6 +109,10 @@ option can be used to override --squash.
+
With --squash, --commit is not allowed, and will fail.
+--no-verify::
+ This option bypasses the pre-merge and commit-msg hooks.
+ See also linkgit:githooks[5].
+
-s <strategy>::
--strategy=<strategy>::
Use the given merge strategy; can be supplied more than
diff --git a/Documentation/rev-list-options.txt b/Documentation/rev-list-options.txt
index bb1251c036..90ff9e2bea 100644
--- a/Documentation/rev-list-options.txt
+++ b/Documentation/rev-list-options.txt
@@ -756,6 +756,22 @@ explicitly-given commit or tree.
Note that the form '--filter=sparse:path=<path>' that wants to read
from an arbitrary path on the filesystem has been dropped for security
reasons.
++
+Multiple '--filter=' flags can be specified to combine filters. Only
+objects which are accepted by every filter are included.
++
+The form '--filter=combine:<filter1>+<filter2>+...<filterN>' can also be
+used to combined several filters, but this is harder than just repeating
+the '--filter' flag and is usually not necessary. Filters are joined by
+'{plus}' and individual filters are %-encoded (i.e. URL-encoded).
+Besides the '{plus}' and '%' characters, the following characters are
+reserved and also must be encoded: `~!@#$^&*()[]{}\;",<>?`+&#39;&#96;+
+as well as all characters with ASCII code &lt;= `0x20`, which includes
+space and newline.
++
+Other arbitrary characters can also be encoded. For instance,
+'combine:tree:3+blob:none' and 'combine:tree%3A3+blob%3Anone' are
+equivalent.
--no-filter::
Turn off any previous `--filter=` argument.
diff --git a/Documentation/technical/api-tree-walking.txt b/Documentation/technical/api-tree-walking.txt
index bde18622a8..7962e32854 100644
--- a/Documentation/technical/api-tree-walking.txt
+++ b/Documentation/technical/api-tree-walking.txt
@@ -62,9 +62,7 @@ Initializing
`setup_traverse_info`::
Initialize a `traverse_info` given the pathname of the tree to start
- traversing from. The `base` argument is assumed to be the `path`
- member of the `name_entry` being recursed into unless the tree is a
- top-level tree in which case the empty string ("") is used.
+ traversing from.
Walking
-------
@@ -140,6 +138,10 @@ same in the next callback invocation.
This utilizes the memory structure of a tree entry to avoid the
overhead of using a generic strlen().
+`strbuf_make_traverse_path`::
+
+ Convenience wrapper to `make_traverse_path` into a strbuf.
+
Authors
-------
diff --git a/Documentation/technical/partial-clone.txt b/Documentation/technical/partial-clone.txt
index 896c7b3878..210373e258 100644
--- a/Documentation/technical/partial-clone.txt
+++ b/Documentation/technical/partial-clone.txt
@@ -30,12 +30,20 @@ advance* during clone and fetch operations and thereby reduce download
times and disk usage. Missing objects can later be "demand fetched"
if/when needed.
+A remote that can later provide the missing objects is called a
+promisor remote, as it promises to send the objects when
+requested. Initialy Git supported only one promisor remote, the origin
+remote from which the user cloned and that was configured in the
+"extensions.partialClone" config option. Later support for more than
+one promisor remote has been implemented.
+
Use of partial clone requires that the user be online and the origin
-remote be available for on-demand fetching of missing objects. This may
-or may not be problematic for the user. For example, if the user can
-stay within the pre-selected subset of the source tree, they may not
-encounter any missing objects. Alternatively, the user could try to
-pre-fetch various objects if they know that they are going offline.
+remote or other promisor remotes be available for on-demand fetching
+of missing objects. This may or may not be problematic for the user.
+For example, if the user can stay within the pre-selected subset of
+the source tree, they may not encounter any missing objects.
+Alternatively, the user could try to pre-fetch various objects if they
+know that they are going offline.
Non-Goals
@@ -100,18 +108,18 @@ or commits that reference missing trees.
Handling Missing Objects
------------------------
-- An object may be missing due to a partial clone or fetch, or missing due
- to repository corruption. To differentiate these cases, the local
- repository specially indicates such filtered packfiles obtained from the
- promisor remote as "promisor packfiles".
+- An object may be missing due to a partial clone or fetch, or missing
+ due to repository corruption. To differentiate these cases, the
+ local repository specially indicates such filtered packfiles
+ obtained from promisor remotes as "promisor packfiles".
+
These promisor packfiles consist of a "<name>.promisor" file with
arbitrary contents (like the "<name>.keep" files), in addition to
their "<name>.pack" and "<name>.idx" files.
- The local repository considers a "promisor object" to be an object that
- it knows (to the best of its ability) that the promisor remote has promised
- that it has, either because the local repository has that object in one of
+ it knows (to the best of its ability) that promisor remotes have promised
+ that they have, either because the local repository has that object in one of
its promisor packfiles, or because another promisor object refers to it.
+
When Git encounters a missing object, Git can see if it is a promisor object
@@ -123,12 +131,12 @@ expensive-to-modify list of missing objects.[a]
- Since almost all Git code currently expects any referenced object to be
present locally and because we do not want to force every command to do
a dry-run first, a fallback mechanism is added to allow Git to attempt
- to dynamically fetch missing objects from the promisor remote.
+ to dynamically fetch missing objects from promisor remotes.
+
When the normal object lookup fails to find an object, Git invokes
-fetch-object to try to get the object from the server and then retry
-the object lookup. This allows objects to be "faulted in" without
-complicated prediction algorithms.
+promisor_remote_get_direct() to try to get the object from a promisor
+remote and then retry the object lookup. This allows objects to be
+"faulted in" without complicated prediction algorithms.
+
For efficiency reasons, no check as to whether the missing object is
actually a promisor object is performed.
@@ -157,8 +165,7 @@ and prefetch those objects in bulk.
+
We are not happy with this global variable and would like to remove it,
but that requires significant refactoring of the object code to pass an
-additional flag. We hope that concurrent efforts to add an ODB API can
-encompass this.
+additional flag.
Fetching Missing Objects
@@ -182,21 +189,63 @@ has been updated to not use any object flags when the corresponding argument
though they are not necessary.
+Using many promisor remotes
+---------------------------
+
+Many promisor remotes can be configured and used.
+
+This allows for example a user to have multiple geographically-close
+cache servers for fetching missing blobs while continuing to do
+filtered `git-fetch` commands from the central server.
+
+When fetching objects, promisor remotes are tried one after the other
+until all the objects have been fetched.
+
+Remotes that are considered "promisor" remotes are those specified by
+the following configuration variables:
+
+- `extensions.partialClone = <name>`
+
+- `remote.<name>.promisor = true`
+
+- `remote.<name>.partialCloneFilter = ...`
+
+Only one promisor remote can be configured using the
+`extensions.partialClone` config variable. This promisor remote will
+be the last one tried when fetching objects.
+
+We decided to make it the last one we try, because it is likely that
+someone using many promisor remotes is doing so because the other
+promisor remotes are better for some reason (maybe they are closer or
+faster for some kind of objects) than the origin, and the origin is
+likely to be the remote specified by extensions.partialClone.
+
+This justification is not very strong, but one choice had to be made,
+and anyway the long term plan should be to make the order somehow
+fully configurable.
+
+For now though the other promisor remotes will be tried in the order
+they appear in the config file.
+
Current Limitations
-------------------
-- The remote used for a partial clone (or the first partial fetch
- following a regular clone) is marked as the "promisor remote".
+- It is not possible to specify the order in which the promisor
+ remotes are tried in other ways than the order in which they appear
+ in the config file.
+
-We are currently limited to a single promisor remote and only that
-remote may be used for subsequent partial fetches.
+It is also not possible to specify an order to be used when fetching
+from one remote and a different order when fetching from another
+remote.
+
+- It is not possible to push only specific objects to a promisor
+ remote.
+
-We accept this limitation because we believe initial users of this
-feature will be using it on repositories with a strong single central
-server.
+It is not possible to push at the same time to multiple promisor
+remote in a specific order.
-- Dynamic object fetching will only ask the promisor remote for missing
- objects. We assume that the promisor remote has a complete view of the
+- Dynamic object fetching will only ask promisor remotes for missing
+ objects. We assume that promisor remotes have a complete view of the
repository and can satisfy all such requests.
- Repack essentially treats promisor and non-promisor packfiles as 2
@@ -218,15 +267,17 @@ server.
Future Work
-----------
-- Allow more than one promisor remote and define a strategy for fetching
- missing objects from specific promisor remotes or of iterating over the
- set of promisor remotes until a missing object is found.
+- Improve the way to specify the order in which promisor remotes are
+ tried.
+
-A user might want to have multiple geographically-close cache servers
-for fetching missing blobs while continuing to do filtered `git-fetch`
-commands from the central server, for example.
+For example this could allow to specify explicitly something like:
+"When fetching from this remote, I want to use these promisor remotes
+in this order, though, when pushing or fetching to that remote, I want
+to use those promisor remotes in that order."
+
+- Allow pushing to promisor remotes.
+
-Or the user might want to work in a triangular work flow with multiple
+The user might want to work in a triangular work flow with multiple
promisor remotes that each have an incomplete view of the repository.
- Allow repack to work on promisor packfiles (while keeping them distinct