Git v1.8.4 Release Notes
========================
+Backward compatibility notes (for Git 2.0)
+------------------------------------------
+
+When "git push [$there]" does not say what to push, we have used the
+traditional "matching" semantics so far (all your branches were sent
+to the remote as long as there already are branches of the same name
+over there). In Git 2.0, the default will change to the "simple"
+semantics that pushes:
+
+ - only the current branch to the branch with the same name, and only
+ when the current branch is set to integrate with that remote
+ branch, if you are pushing to the same remote as you fetch from; or
+
+ - only the current branch to the branch with the same name, if you
+ are pushing to a remote that is not where you usually fetch from.
+
+Use the user preference configuration variable "push.default" to
+change this. If you are an old-timer who is used to the "matching"
+semantics, you can set the variable to "matching" to keep the
+traditional behaviour. If you want to live in the future early, you
+can set it to "simple" today without waiting for Git 2.0.
+
+When "git add -u" (and "git add -A") is run inside a subdirectory and
+does not specify which paths to add on the command line, it
+will operate on the entire tree in Git 2.0 for consistency
+with "git commit -a" and other commands. There will be no
+mechanism to make plain "git add -u" behave like "git add -u .".
+Current users of "git add -u" (without a pathspec) should start
+training their fingers to explicitly say "git add -u ."
+before Git 2.0 comes. A warning is issued when these commands are
+run without a pathspec and when you have local changes outside the
+current directory, because the behaviour in Git 2.0 will be different
+from today's version in such a situation.
+
+In Git 2.0, "git add <path>" will behave as "git add -A <path>", so
+that "git add dir/" will notice paths you removed from the directory
+and record the removal. Versions before Git 2.0, including this
+release, will keep ignoring removals, but the users who rely on this
+behaviour are encouraged to start using "git add --ignore-removal <path>"
+now before 2.0 is released.
+
+
Updates since v1.8.3
--------------------
Foreign interfaces, subsystems and ports.
+ * "git rebase -i" now honors --strategy and -X options.
+
* Git-gui has been updated to its 0.18.0 version.
* MediaWiki remote helper (in contrib/) has been updated to use the
UI, Workflows & Features
+ * "gitweb" learned to optionally place extra links that point at the
+ levels higher than the Gitweb pages themselves in the breadcrumbs,
+ so that it can be used as part of a larger installation.
+
+ * "git log --format=" now honors i18n.logoutputencoding configuration
+ variable.
+
+ * The "push.default=simple" mode of "git push" has been updated to
+ behave like "current" without requiring a remote tracking
+ information, when you push to a remote that is different from where
+ you fetch from (i.e. a triangular workflow).
+
+ * Having multiple "fixup!" on a line in the rebase instruction sheet
+ did not work very well with "git rebase -i --autosquash".
+
+ * "git log" learned the "--author-date-order" option, with which the
+ output is topologically sorted and commits in parallel histories
+ are shown intermixed together based on the author timestamp.
+
+ * Various subcommands of "git submodule" refused to run from anywhere
+ other than the top of the working tree of the superproject, but
+ they have been taught to let you run from a subdirectory.
+
+ * "git diff" learned a mode that ignores hunks whose change consists
+ only of additions and removals of blank lines, which is the same as
+ "diff -B" (ignore blank lines) of GNU diff.
+
+ * "git rm" gives a single message followed by list of paths to report
+ multiple paths that cannot be removed.
+
+ * "git rebase" can be told with ":/look for this string" syntax commits
+ to replay the changes onto and where the work to be replayed begins.
+
* Many tutorials teach users to set "color.ui" to "auto" as the first
thing after you set "user.name/email" to introduce yourselves to
Git. Now the variable defaults to "auto".
+ * On Cygwin, "cygstart" is now recognised as a possible way to start
+ a web browser (used in "help -w" and "instaweb" among others).
+
* "git status" learned status.branch and status.short configuration
variables to use --branch and --short options by default (override
with --no-branch and --no-short options from the command line).
* "git rebase" learned "--[no-]autostash" option to save local
changes instead of refusing to run (to which people's normal
- response was to stash them and re-run).
+ response was to stash them and re-run). This introduced a corner
+ case breakage to "git am --abort" but it has been fixed.
* Instead of typing four capital letters "HEAD", you can say "@" now,
e.g. "git log @".
Performance, Internal Implementation, etc.
+ * The original way to specify remote repository using .git/branches/
+ used to have a nifty feature. The code to support the feature was
+ still in a function but the caller was changed not to call it 5
+ years ago, breaking that feature and leaving the supporting code
+ unreachable. The dead code has been removed.
+
+ * "git pack-refs" that races with new ref creation or deletion have
+ been susceptible to lossage of refs under right conditions, which
+ has been tightened up.
+
+ * We read loose and packed rerferences in two steps, but after
+ deciding to read a loose ref but before actually opening it to read
+ it, another process racing with us can unlink it, which would cause
+ us to barf. The codepath has been updated to retry when such a
+ race is detected, instead of outright failing.
+
* Uses of the platform fnmatch(3) function (many places in the code,
matching pathspec, .gitignore and .gitattributes to name a few)
have been replaced with wildmatch, allowing "foo/**/bar" that would
track are contained in this release (see release notes to them for
details).
+ * "git diff" refused to even show difference when core.safecrlf is
+ set to true (i.e. error out) and there are offending lines in the
+ working tree files.
+ (merge 5430bb2 jc/maint-diff-core-safecrlf later to maint).
+
+ * A test that should have failed but didn't revealed a bug that needs
+ to be corrected.
+ (merge 94d75d1 jc/t1512-fix later to maint).
+
+ * An overlong path to a .git directory may have overflown the
+ temporary path buffer used to create a name for lockfiles.
+ (merge 2fbd4f9 mh/maint-lockfile-overflow later to maint).
+
+ * Invocations of "git checkout" used internally by "git rebase" were
+ counted as "checkout", and affected later "git checkout -" to the
+ the user to an unexpected place.
+ (merge 3bed291 rr/rebase-checkout-reflog later to maint).
+
+ * "git stash save", when your local change turns a tracked file into
+ a directory, has to remove files in that directory in order to
+ revert your working tree to a pristine state. This will lose
+ untracked files in such a directory, and the command now requires
+ you to "--force" it.
+
+ * The configuration variable column.ui was poorly documented.
+ (merge 5e62cc1 rr/column-doc later to maint).
+
+ * "git name-rev --refs=tags/v*" were forbidden, which was a bit
+ inconvenient (you had to give a pattern to match refs fully, like
+ --refs=refs/tags/v*).
+ (merge 98c5c4a nk/name-rev-abbreviated-refs later to maint).
+
+ * "git apply" parsed patches that add new files, generated by
+ programs other than Git, incorrectly. This is an old breakage in
+ v1.7.11 and will need to be merged down to the maintanance tracks.
+ (merge 212eb96 tr/maint-apply-non-git-patch-parsefix later to maint).
+
+ * Older cURL wanted piece of memory we call it with to be stable, but
+ we updated the auth material after handing it to a call.
+ (merge a94cf2c bc/http-keep-memory-given-to-curl later to maint).
+
+ * "git pull" into nothing trashed "local changes" that were in the
+ index, and this avoids it.
+ (merge b4dc085 jk/pull-into-dirty-unborn later to maint).
+
+ * Many "git submodule" operations do not work on a submodule at a
+ path whose name is not in ASCII.
+ (merge bed9470 fg/submodule-non-ascii-path later to maint).
+
+ * "cherry-pick" had a small leak in an error codepath.
+ (merge 706728a fc/sequencer-plug-leak later to maint).
+
* Logic used by git-send-email to suppress cc mishandled names like
"A U. Thor" <author@example.xz>, where the human readable part
needs to be quoted (the user input may not have the double quotes
around the name, and comparison was done between quoted and
- unquoted strings).
+ unquoted strings). It also mishandled names that need RFC2047
+ quoting.
(merge 1495266 mt/send-email-cc-match-fix later to maint).
* Call to discard_cache/discard_index (used when we use different